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Asia's Tech News for the WorldSun, 02 Aug 2015 10:31:58 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Marketing lessons from the durian tradehttps://www.techinasia.com/talk/marketing-lessons-from-the-durian-trade/
https://www.techinasia.com/talk/marketing-lessons-from-the-durian-trade/#commentsFri, 31 Jul 2015 04:23:06 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/talk/marketing-lessons-from-the-durian-trade/Ahh.. durian… the lovely King of Fruits, according to South East Asians. Here in Singapore, durians are the rage. Mostly imported from neighbouring Malaysia, it has become a cultural activity to eat and buy a durian anywhere from US$5 to as expensive as US$30. This year, there was a bumper harvest and coupled with the Ramadan season in Malaysia, many durians came travelling to Singapore, in hope of getting eaten by food connoisseurs.

With so many hybrids of durians, to the many famed places in Singapore selling them, it has gone from a craze to just insane as to how locals can wait in line for their prized fruit. So why mention the whole issue of durian and how do we learn from the durian trade and how it has been abused of late?

One night, I had a craving for durian and decided to line up with the wife at a famed durian stall. Set up in an isolated carpark, the whole place was swamped with cars galore as durian lovers all came to have their supper fill of the fruit. ‘Terrible’ and ‘unfair’ were the thoughts as we waited patiently in line to buy. Despite being sixth in line, the durian seller took over 75 minutes to serve me. While waiting, people walked past us and engaged a conversation with the seller. And before I knew it, the seller began serving these people. When I asked later on why they were served first, he just smiled and said they are his regulars who have already called and reserved their durians. Reserve my foot.

In between all that, chauffeurs coming in all types of luxuries cars drove up and came out and spoke in a huff to the seller, “Tow kay (the boss) wants his usual and is finishing his dinner soon so he wants it now!” and the durian seller focuses on this extra large order without caring about my black face. “US$100 in all,” says the durian seller as he passes the bags of cut fruit, and the chauffeur passes him an extra tip of US$15, smiling through his gold teeth.

As it finally reached my turn, I glared angrily and folded my arms at the guy who tried to snatch the durian seller away from me, who intelligently backed away. The durian seller then gave me the best customer service ever, apologising for the wait. Starting from what is your favourite type to what flavour you enjoy to how much you can eat. Eventually, I can’t recall what happened but I ended up buying the most expensive breed at 2.7kg for US$35! (I am such a sucker)

So what business lessons can we learn?

1. Love your best customers with the 80/20 rule

80% sales comes from 20% of your clients cum regulars. They spend the most and the margins are literally the highest. In my story above, you can see the towkays who were more than happy to pay for many durians, along with giving a tip to the seller to ensure the seller gives them priority.

Lesson learnt – In your business, have you identified who are your core key clients and have you given them priority service or privileges? Clients always want to be recognised and pampered for their business to you, especially if they are regulars.

2. Product expansion

The humble durian has proliferated into so many types. 30 years back, the best durian was D24, but now there are easily more than 10 types of all flavours and tastes. The durian growers knew that if no product innovation was done, the craze for durian might just die out. So comes the many varieties – Cat Mountain King, D101, Red Prawn, King of Kings, etc.

Lesson learnt – In your product that you have been building, have you created different sub-brands which you can target a different clientele or re-excite your client base to come back and try your product in a different experience?

3. Customer Service Recovery

I was definitely mad for the unfair practices that the durian seller did, but his quick turnaround of apologising to me and telling me he has a great recommendation for me made me relent and happy that I finally gave in and end up buying a more expensive durian than expected.

Lesson learnt – When you have a disgruntled client, do you have quick client recovery measures in place? Remember that when a person is unhappy about your business, he will bad mouth you to at least seven people. It gets worse on social media. Having good recovery services help to stem the negative brand perception.

4. Abusing the durian for PR: Grabdurians, Jordan Yeoh

Knowing that durian is the current talk of the town, I saw two incidents on how the durian was abused for public relations. First of all was Jordan Yeoh, crowned as Malaysia’s hottest hunk 2011, who shamelessly acted like a durian seller while posing his hunky sweaty body off. He knew that durians was a great attention getter, so why not pose with it at the same time to up his brand value? I am sure right now he will get more contracts, maybe selling durian cakes? Another was Grabtaxi, who knew that durians were a major draw and prepare a whole grabdurian event to excite consumers to download their app. They knew the local culture in Malaysia and Singapore and decided to turn it to their marketing advantage.

Lesson learnt – drop the standard crap of Google adwords and Facebook ads. They are an extreme waste of money. Growthhacking is in where you focus on the ability to create a viral sharing pace to gain traction. I am sure Jordan Yeoh has received much more Facebook likes now with his durian stunt. Grabtaxi possibly has now lots more users with their app and a lot of smelly filled durian taxis. In your line of business, can you discover the latest discussion trends in your community? How can you make your product to tie-in together with the current trends?

So there you go, entrepreneurial lessons to be learnt while impatiently waiting so long to eat the durian. Feel free to share more innovative marketing stunts that your company has tried out!

The writer is director and mentor of Angels Gate Advisory, which promotes Singapore entrepreneurship. He has given up on lining at popular durian stalls and hopes friends will invite him to a durian party soon before the season ends.

Plucked out of a pool of over 1,000 applications, MAP’s “Cohort 1” is comprised of 52 startups focusing on ASEAN and 25 social enterprises that will build their businesses to become investment-ready at the MaGIC campus in Cyberjaya over the next four months.

“MAP is designed to build and grow an ASEAN community of startups that have the opportunity to foster relationships and achieve a regional outlook, access regional resources, and exchange knowledge with peers,” says Cheryl Yeoh, CEO of MaGIC, which stands for Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Center.

“The success of the program will be evident when these entrepreneurs are able to grow their startup or social enterprise, and raise funding from private investors or sustain their businesses after demo day,” she adds.

MAP’s ASEAN track will help the 52 selected startups scale their products, prepare them for early-stage funding and partnerships, and guide them on expansion into global markets. Sixty percent of the participants under this track come from Malaysia, while the rest are spread across Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, US, Uruguay, and Vietnam. They’re targeting a wide range of verticals such as agriculture, big data, clean tech, design, ecommerce, gaming, healthcare, media, security, and travel.

On the other hand, the Social Enterprise track – the first of its kind in Malaysia – aims to accelerate and develop 25 ideas from all over the country that address social and environmental issues. These startups hail from Kuala Lumpur, Sarawak, Johor, Selangor, Penang, Kedah, and Pahang.

“This is now the largest accelerator in Southeast Asia, if not Asia. I’ve actually not heard of anyone take in over 70 companies in one batch,” claims Yeoh.

Funding and other perks

The accelerator program will be made up of weekly “platoon” or small group sessions for peer-to-peer learning, social outreach activities, check-ins with mentors and investors, and business development opportunities with potential market partners.

“MAP is heavily supported by mentors who are either qualified entrepreneurs or experts in their own areas,” Yeoh notes.

For the ASEAN track, MaGIC will provide no seed funding but it has negotiated perks worth over US$400,000 per startup from corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Evernote, and Amazon. MaGIC also provides a strong link to market partners such as Axiata, Tune Talk, Accenture, Maybank, and Digi Macrokiosk.

The curriculum outlined in this track include various thematic and guided discussions, brainstorming sessions, and knowledge and experience sharing sessions that will culminate with a demo day to potentially 500 investors. These investors include Khailee Ng of 500 Startups, Erman Akinci of Catcha Group, Aziz Hussein of Cradle Seed Ventures, and Lim Kuo-Yi of Monk’s Hill.

While working on developing their businesses, the startups will also have access to mentors such as Jamaludin Bujang, CEO of MAVCAP; Joel Neoh, founder of KFit; Giulio Xiloyannis, managing director of Zalora; and Cheryl Goh, vice president of GrabTaxi.

Through the Social Enterprise track, selected participants will be able to build a sustainable business model while learning how to measure impact created. Each enterprise will receive seed funding of RM30,000 (nearly US$8,000) to pilot their ideas. And by the end of the program, they will pitch to impact investors and venture philanthropists at an event organized with AirAsia and Think City.

Takes after Startup Chile

MAP’s first cohort will run from July 27 to November 28, 2015. Effective 2016, there will be two cohorts each year.

The program is modeled after Startup Chile, which attracts foreign talent that will stay for a while to exchange knowledge with the local community.

Unlike other accelerators, it does not take equity from participating startups and covers all their living expenses and accommodation.

MAP is just one initiative run by MaGIC, the government agency dedicated to growing Malaysia’s startup and entrepreneurship scene.

Recently, the agency partnered with US venture capital firm 500 Startups for the accelerator program Distro Dojo. Distro Dojo is also open to all startups in Southeast Asia, although this time, only growth-stage ones.

Bus transportation in many developing countries is unorganized to say the least. As a result, much of the booking happens offline at the bus operator’s physical ticketing counter. Indian startup RedBus shows it’s possible to enable real-time booking across a wide selection of bus operators.

“Ever since the acquisition, we have been working to build out the new global platform and mobile apps,” says Ashish Kashyap, founder and CEO of Ibibo Group, a firm which is backed by both Tencent and Naspers and acquired RedBus back in 2013.

In India, RedBus covers 67,000 bus routes. Now overseas, the startup has begun by aggregating 5,700 different routes in Singapore and Malaysia. This includes tickets between Singapore and Malaysia but also intercity tickets for destinations around Malaysia. On a daily basis, there are 100,000 seats available for sale on RedBus. The ticket booking can also be done in local currency – Singapore dollars or Malaysian ringgit.

Similar to India, bus operators in Malaysia most often sell tickets physically. The system is inefficient and prone to fraud because employees can misrepresent a bus’s fill rate and pocket the cash. Yet, operators still seem resistant to adopting technology due to familiarity with the old ways.

Though this presents a huge opportunity, RedBus is likely to face a tough competition from BusOnlineTicket, which not only sells tickets through its web portal and mobile apps, but also via the physical outlets of SingPost and S.A.M machines located throughout Singapore.

BusOnlineTicket also has a SaaS solution that enables ticketing, scheduling, and staff management. This is a lot like RedBus’s offerings called Bogds, a cloud solution for bus companies to manage operations, and SeatSeller, a global distribution system for travel agents to sell bus inventory. The other players in these markets include EasyBook and CatchThatBus.

The expansion to international markets comes at a time when RedBus has achieved a milestone in its domestic market. Currently, it claims a market share of a whopping three quarters. This growth also comes on the back of increasing mobile transactions and live tracking of buses. In India, RedBus also has access to exclusive inventory of government-run buses in weak markets, mainly in North India.

Much like the taxi aggregators, RedBus is acquiring customers through deep discounts. Given its funding muscle, it does have the capacity to eat up smaller home-grown players in the Southeast Asian markets it just entered.

Even if your toothbrush is newer, cleaner, fancier, more colorful, electrically powered or emits ultrasonic wave, I still prefer mine. After all, why would I want to use someone else’s toothbrush. Yuck!

This is fine if we are just talking about toothbrushes but in reality, we have the same concept towards other peoples’ ideas. We tend to prefer ideas we came up with rather than those from others. This is known as the Not-Invented-Here bias or the Toothbrush Theory.

The Toothbrush Theory — Everyone wants a toothbrush, everyone needs one, everyone has one, but no one wants to use anyone else’s

In the book The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely, he talks about how we value ideas we came up with more, even if it is exactly the same as someone else’s. He crafted experiments where people were asked to generate solution from a pre-determined set of words. He seeded these words in such a way that every possible solution have the exact same meaning. As you probably guessed, people still prefer the solution they crafted themselves.

Entrepreneurs are prone to this bias because they are inherently optimistic about their ideas. Why else would they quit their job and pursue some crazy untested venture? These are people who fall in love with their idea and decide to dedicate their life to making it a reality. They really do think their toothbrush is better than yours.

In many cases, they are right and their ideas turned into multi-billion dollar empires. However, for the rest of us, we may have over-estimated how cool and awesome our toothbrush really is. But fret not, there is a way or rather ways for us to really make sure our toothbrush is as great as we think it is.

Share your toothbrush

First we have to accept that we will have to share our ideas with others. As the saying goes, ideas are worthless, execution is everything. An idea can’t change the world unless it is brought to life. Since we want to make sure our ideas are worth the time and effort, we will have to get some feedbacks and validation.

Talk to your family members, friends, colleagues or potential customers of your idea. You’ll be surprised how many ideas are founded on wrong assumptions and can be invalidated by simply talking to someone else. Don’t be sad if you found out your toothbrush was nothing more than a regular piece of plastic. At least you didn’t bet your life on it and if you are lucky, you may get some new insights for your next killer toothbrush.

Make sure they really need a toothbrush

We also have to be wary about how we are pitching our ideas to others. We don’t want to shove our toothbrush down their throat. It’s not a very pleasant experience and we actually want them to do the talking.

Most ideas are really just solutions to non existing problems. We may think our toothbrush is the one our customer deserves but unfortunately it is not the one they need. Be open to their suggestions and feedbacks. We may learn a thing or two about them and maybe next time, we’ll have the toothbrush they need.

Pre-sell your toothbrush

If you are lucky enough to talk to people who actually need your solution for their problem, try to make sure they put their money where their mouth is. We don’t want to waste our time on problems they aren’t willing to pay to solve. Remember, we want to sell them the toothbrush, not give them away for free.

It may not need to be actual cold hard cash but at least some form of currency like their email address or phone number. Some way for them to show interest in your idea. But of course, nothing beats cash, so always aim for that whenever possible.

Brush their teeth without the toothbrush

Once you have confirmed they have a problem you can solve and is willing to pay for it, then there is one final step to make sure that your toothbrush is the toothbrush they are looking for.

You will need to figure out a way to deliver the promised result of your solution without actually building it. To put it another way, you have to make sure their teeth are clean without using a toothbrush. Manufacturing a toothbrush requires significantly larger investment so you want to make sure you got the right design and features before making your order with the factory.

For example, lets say you want to start a toothbrush subscription service. You asked around and manage to pre-sell to some customers. Before you start building a website, coordinating logistics and setting up billing plans, start by manually delivering toothbrushes to a few customers first. You’ll learn what type of packaging works better and if your customer prefer monthly, quarterly or yearly plans.

The point here is to learn as much as you can before committing more resources and time into your idea. Having a website, premise or trading license doesn’t make your idea real. It is real when the business model is sound and to make sure it works, do a test run first.

The Minimum Viable Toothbrush

Those who have read The Lean Startup book by Eric Ries will probably realize that all these talk about toothbrushes was really about idea validation methods described in the book, namely The Interview, Pre-sell and Concierge method.

If you are serious about your ideas and want to make sure they are worth your time and effort, read the book. But if you, like most people, learn best by applying and practicing the methods then I encourage you to participate in Lean Startup Machine workshops organized around the world. You will be working in teams to validate ideas using the 3 methods described above.

I’ve attended and mentored at Lean Startup Machine Kuala Lumpur back in June and it was an amazing experience. This isn’t your usual workshop. You will be getting out of the building trying to convince strangers to buy your toothbrush. So unless you have talked to and interviewed others, gotten some currency from them or even better, demonstrated how your toothbrush is the best, mine is still better than yours.

Note from Huiyi, TIA’s community manager:
The Lean Startup Machine is happening at Kota Kinabalu on 23–25 Oct 2015. Leave your email here to be notified when they start the limited early bird discount sales.

KFit, a startup in Malaysia that offers users unlimited access to gyms and fitness classes for a monthly fee, has scored a coup. It today announced a US$3.25 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital.

The startup has been on a tear since it launched in May this year, helping users make 400,000 bookings a month. That’s a growth of four times. It has expanded rapidly across Asia, with fitness establishment partners growing five times. Available in six cities, it’s now targeting Auckland, Seoul and Manila.

Joel Neoh, the startup’s founder, seems to be riding on a fast wave. The enterprising Malaysian, who also started a daily deals site that got bought by Groupon, is capitalizing on the rising awareness of health and fitness in Asia.

As he puts it in the press release: “To inspire people to live healthier lives, KFit is catalyzing a new consumer movement to involve the 96 percent of Asians who currently don’t belong to a gym.”

On-demand service startup Be Lazee today revealed that it has raised US$500,000 in funding from Cradle Fund, KK Fund, and an unnamed angel investor.

Be Lazee is an SMS-based service that lets you do what its name suggests by getting someone do your errands for you. It’s like US-based Magic, which first got people talking about this kind of concierge service.

The Malaysian-based startup operates in its home country as Be Malas (which means “be lazy” in Malay). It also operates in Singapore and Hong Kong.

You can put in a request to the service through text message, and its team of concierges called “Rajin Runners” will get the job done within a given time frame. The requests can range from household affairs to business matters – all for a base fee of RM 25 (US$7). Requests can be made between 9 am and 7 pm.

Adlin Yusman, one of Be Malas’ co-founders, says the team will use the fresh funds for front- and back-end improvements as well as for hiring more staff so they can expand the business regionally.

The Philippines has announced a plan to build a national innovation center – taking cue from Silicon Valley in the US, Block 71 in Singapore, and MaGIC in Malaysia.

Government agencies, including the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), are collaborating with startup accelerator IdeaSpace for this effort.

With initial funding of PHP 30 million (US$665,000) from the government and counterpart funding of up to PHP 15 million (US$332,000) from private sector and academe, the innovation center will have two locations – both of which will be near the country’s premier universities.

“When we founded IdeaSpace in 2012, we wanted to find the next big innovative idea and create a startup ecosystem that embodies the Silicon Valley-mindset of using technology and science to create massive change in the world,” said Earl Martin Valencia, president and co-founder at IdeaSpace.

“Now, we realize the dream to create Philippines’ own innovation hub with our initial collaboration with the government and the academe where startups and high-potential research can get the support they need in order to grow and thrive,” Valencia added.

The Philippine innovation center will foster technology advancement and startup ecosystem growth. Valencia said the hubs will be set up near key academic institutions to imbibe the spirit of innovative and entrepreneurial thinking among students, to tap into a wellspring of engineering and technology talent from these universities, as well as to address the growing interest of students in founding their own startups.

Calling on more partners

The center will also serve as a venue for government agencies and academic institutions to promote products, facilitate transfer of their R&D results, and establish connections with the investment community.

“It has always been DOST’s thrust to support technology transfer of R&D output, either through commercialization or deployment for public good. The innovation center, we believe, will be a critical and effective agent in delivering R&D results to the people,” DOST undersecretary Rowena Cristina Guevara said.

DTI undersecretary Nora Terrado added: “The DTI strongly supports entrepreneurship and innovation in the Philippines to realize economic growth that is truly inclusive. Tech startups present a growing spectrum of opportunities for Filipinos to compete in the international stage as they create new solutions to pressing social and environmental problems. In the process, this will spur economic activities resulting from the value and employment generated.”

Valencia notes the initiatives represents the Philippines’ first ever public-private partnership that focuses on innovation and aims to improve the country’s position in the global digital economy. “We can’t do it alone, so we’re calling on more partners… to help us push this initiative forward.”

The creation of the innovation hub will be a critical component in boosting the Philippines’ ranking in the Digital Evolution Index (DEI), which ranks countries in terms of their readiness for the quickly expanding digital economy.

The Philippines is one of the so-called “break-out” nations in the recent global DEI study conducted by the US-based Fletcher School at Tufts University, using data from 2008 to 2013. The country stands alongside China, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam as one of the “rapidly advancing countries” in the global digital topography.

What do you think of the Philippines’ plan to build its own innovation hub? Will it take off? What are the challenges? And what lessons can the Philippines learn from neighbors Singapore and Malaysia? Feel free to share your thoughts.

Malaysia-based iCar Asia, which runs automotive marketplace sites in three countries, today announced it plans to raise another A$3.5 million (US$2.6 million) in fresh funds from a rights issue.

The new capital raising exercise will bring total funds so far generated by the company this month to A$15 million (US$11.2 million). iCar Asia is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.

iCar Asia’s network includes Carlist in Malaysia; One2Car, ThaiCar, and Autospinn in Thailand; and Mobil123 in Indonesia. The company said that the funding is sufficient to “see the business through to profitability.”

iCar Asia said the funds will be used for new mobile apps and to roll out new advertising products for automakers that are designed to increase the company’s share of the online new car advertising market. Plus, it will launch a “cost per lead” advertising service, enabling the company to participate in used car market commission revenues. There are no plans to expand to new countries.

Reaching out to shareholders

On July 1, it announced it completed the placement of 17,692,308 new common shares to select institutional investors at A$0.65 per share, or a total of A$11.5 million (US$8.6 million).

The issue price was a 7.8 percent discount to iCar Asia’s market closing price of A$0.705 on June 30. The placement will be settled on July 9, and the shares will be issued on July 10.

In addition to the placement, the company announced that it intends to undertake a 1:44 rights issue for eligible shareholders that will generate proceeds of up to A$3.5 million (US$2.6 million). A rights issue entitles a company’s existing shareholders to buy additional shares directly from the company in proportion to their existing holdings within a fixed time period.

The rights issue price is the same offered to institutional investors under the private placement. The record date for the rights issue is expected to be on or around July 10. The issue will be offered to retail shareholders with a registered address in Australia or New Zealand and institutional investors in Australia and certain overseas jurisdictions.

Catcha Group, a company controlled by Patrick Grove and Lucas Elliott, intends to take up its full entitlement under the rights issue, iCar Asia said.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/icar-asia-funding/feed/03 reasons why job applications suckhttps://www.techinasia.com/talk/3-reasons-job-applications-suck/
https://www.techinasia.com/talk/3-reasons-job-applications-suck/#commentsMon, 06 Jul 2015 08:16:48 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?post_type=talk&p=255698Most of today’s job seekers have filled out an online application on a company’s website. These online applications ask candidates to input their personal and résumé information, usually in the form of drop-down menus and blank fields, which usually takes days to finish. That information then becomes part of a vast database of applicants, of whom only a lucky few are ever actually contacted by employers.

1) Online applications take too long to fill out

It’s funny how considering we are in the age of fast internet, and we have access to plenty plugins to fasten the signing up process in online products such as Gmail, Facebook andLinkedIn, job applications process require a painstaking long time to just type in all your details, which may not be all important in the pursuit of getting a job.

2) Candidates interact with a robot the whole time

After submitting an application, a bot email will inform us the next step of the application and assigns us a number ID, just like a prison system (tongue in cheek). The main point here is individuals are not given the opportunity to interact with an actual human being to ask for guidance/feedback on their application.

3) Candidates who apply online are often ignored

25% of survey respondents indicated that they never received employer acknowledgement of their last online application. Seniors and millennials appeared to be most likely of all age groups to be ignored by employers, with nearly 45% of seniors and 40% of millennials reporting that they didn’t get an employer response.

Note from Huiyi, TIA’s community manager:
Shahrul Sufian Hamdan is the founder of SenangKerja, an all in one job application platform for Malaysians.

It has been almost 2 months since I relocated to Singapore. During this time I saw about 100 fintech projects at different stages. My last article was dedicated to 5 most promising mPOS-acquiring startups, and now I’d like to introduce 15 more projects.

Fastacash

An open API system for banks (Southeast Asia, India, South Africa), payment systems like Mastercard/Visa/AmEx, telecom operators and remittance systems that is integrated with social networks and messengers . It allows users to transfer money to anyone via any messenger or social network just by using a person’s nickname. Choose someone from your contacts and send him the money. The system withdraws it from your bank account or card and transfers it to that person. Fastacash recently integrated with Axis Bank – the second biggest bank in India. The company is managed by a very experienced and strong team.

Ayannah

Ayannah is one of the largest money transfer services in the Philippines. It operates through partners with 7000 selling points by integrating remittance software and providing customer service for the clients. Mikko is surely “offline genius” – because of a very weak banking system in the Philippines he had to learn how to “parasitise” on nonbank selling points (small shops, pharmacies, pawnshops and others). This allows him to increase the pace of development and cut his spendings on building a network.

2C2P

2C2P is a payments company from Thailand and incorporated in Singapore. It’s striving to become the Southeast-Asian Stripe or PayPal. They are actively entering other countries and recently successfully closed another round of fundraising.

VMoney

It is hard to call VMoney a startup – it is considered a successful company with a positive cashflow, which hopes to become the Asian Bancorp. They are not looking for investors and more interested in partners and advisors. The development team is located in Canada and it’s interesting how the company is making good use of cutting-edge technologies.

HomePay

HomePay is still a small project in the very beginning of its journey. There are plenty of Simple bank clones around the globe, but HomePay has a very specific target audience. They want to create “Simple for families”.

CapitalMatch & Crowdonomic

Here we have two very promising SME alternative lending solutions: CapitalMatch and Crowdonomic – crowdinvesting service that launched in 2012 and received its trading license in Malaysia in 2015.

Lenddo

Just a reminder that there are no centralised scoring agencies in the Philippines so the idea of lending is still emerging and mainly disbursed by MFIs rather than banks. The R&D department is located in the US while the HQ is in the Philippines. Lenddo has recently opened a number of new offices in Columbia and a few other countries. The shareholders team looks extremely strong: Accel and Credit Suisse are two of the many. Their plan is to tapped on the unbaked markets around the world. The team has an incredible amount of ideas on the analyses of mobile and social networks users’ data. This can not only be used for lending itself, but also for marketing, advertising, business management etc.

TIDE

A Malaysia startup focused on pinging nearby mobile devices (the area of IoT and O2O) and connecting them with others. The team is very strong: all the members comes from Silverlake – the biggest system integrator for banks in Southeast Asia. Here’s a very interesting Forbes article about them. The monetisation model is currently based only on advertising contracts with other companies and advertising agencies. TIDE is planning to cover card-not-present payments and cash registers. They already collected 10 million MAC-addresses (half of the Kuala Lumpur population) and has registered 800 million locations on the map. This startup is several months old and so far it only attracted 10 clients with 100 selling points.

POS management cloud solutions and the replacement of traditional cash registers with tablets are showing fast growth in Southeast Asia today. Therefore I would like to highlight the following players.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/talk/15-fintech-projects-asia-worth-paying-attention/feed/11Malaysia hired McKinsey to help it develop the startup ecosystem. Waste of money?https://www.techinasia.com/talk/malaysia-hired-mckinsey-to-help-it-develop-a-startup-ecosystem-waste-of-money/
https://www.techinasia.com/talk/malaysia-hired-mckinsey-to-help-it-develop-a-startup-ecosystem-waste-of-money/#commentsTue, 23 Jun 2015 11:25:20 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/talk/malaysia-hired-mckinsey-to-help-it-develop-a-startup-ecosystem-waste-of-money/I read in the Australian Financial Review that the Malaysian government has engaged consulting firm McKinsey & Company to advise on the best approach to grow tech entrepreneurship in the country and create something “better than Silicon Valley.”

From what I’ve seen, the move appears to be already drawing the heckles from some people in the startup community. Some see it as a way for the government to pin the blame on someone should the plan fail. Others question what value McK can bring to the table given Malaysia already has MaGIC, and yet others say that you can’t build innovation with consultants.

It reminds me of some stuff I read about management consultants recently, that they’re just there to tell their clients what they want to hear. Then again, I’m not a consultant, nor do I have deep knowledge about the inner workings of the Malaysian government. So what do I know, right?

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/talk/malaysia-hired-mckinsey-to-help-it-develop-a-startup-ecosystem-waste-of-money/feed/26Restaurant booking service Offpeak served $800K series A fundinghttps://www.techinasia.com/offpeak-gobi-partners-funding/
https://www.techinasia.com/offpeak-gobi-partners-funding/#commentsTue, 23 Jun 2015 03:00:00 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=253645
Malaysia’s restaurant booking service Offpeak has received US$800,000 in a series A round, the company announced today. The funding comes from Shanghai-based venture capital firm Gobi Partners. Offpeak will put the new funds towards expansion into new markets, establishment of local teams, and boosting its marketing signal.

Offpeak provides restaurant suggestions and discounts during off-peak hours. A bit like airlines discounting tickets on their off-seasons, it helps fill chairs in that limbo between breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Customers get better prices and restaurants get more value out of those traditionally slow hours.

The startup reached out to Gobi Partners because of the venture capital firm’s investment experience in the online to offline (O2O) and foods and beverages (F&B) sectors, according to co-founder Lau Ngee Keong. “From our first meeting, it was obvious there was good synergy between us, and to date we have received strong understanding and support from Gobi Partners in our business model, which we have been most pleased about,” he tells Tech in Asia.

Spicing it up in Thailand

The Offpeak team is targeting three to four new markets for expansion in the coming year, starting with Thailand. It’s an interesting change of pace for the startup, which just a few months ago was content to keep expanding within Malaysia, leaving other markets for one or two years down the road. Combined with this series A funding, things could accelerate even more.

“Initially during our launch in August 2014, we were more in an exploratory stage, but the market really surprised us,” Lau explains. “The acceptance rate from both restaurant partners and users has been phenomenal, leading us to believe that we can play a similar role as Airbnb for the F&B industry. It has certainly accelerated the rollout of our initial plans and we’re thinking of bigger and better things than we originally imagined.”

Within 10 months, Offpeak claims to have attracted over 600 restaurant partners, a 10-fold increase since launching in August. Its userbase has grown 30 times during that period (no absolute figure is provided), an average 50 percent month-on-month growth, according to Lau. He attributes this to Offpeak’s instant gratification mechanism, which allows users to book a restaurant up to 10 minutes before turning up.

“We intentionally made our platform hassle-free for users and restaurateurs alike,” he says. “This results in a win-win situation for both restaurateurs and users – steering new customers to restaurateurs by introducing new restaurants to users.”

Avoiding rush-hour

Other startups are already getting into this off-peak booking sector, which perhaps prompted the Malaysian startup to pick up its pace. Eatigo, which was a finalist at our most recent Startup Arena battle, already covers Singapore, Bangkok, and Pattaya, with plans for more cities for expansion.

Monetization is still not a priority in Offpeak’s strategy. The company has said it will focus on first expanding its user base and traffic before worrying about revenue. “In the immediate term, our primary focus is to ensure that we continue to deliver the same success in every market we expand into,” Lau says.

The time ahead will be dedicated to the company’s market expansion plans and marketing efforts, but also to improving its product. “We cannot lose sight of our core business,” Lau points out. “We will continue to enhance our customer experience on our responsive website and mobile app and improve our operations efficiency through feedback from our restaurant partners and users.”

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/offpeak-gobi-partners-funding/feed/412 women entrepreneurs who smashed the glass ceiling in Southeast Asiahttps://www.techinasia.com/12-women-entrepreneurs-who-smashed-the-glass-ceiling-southeast-asia/
https://www.techinasia.com/12-women-entrepreneurs-who-smashed-the-glass-ceiling-southeast-asia/#commentsTue, 16 Jun 2015 09:00:54 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=252538In business, men have traditionally ruled. Most of today’s biggest startups were founded and are run by men. Yet some women are changing the scene.

Tech in Asia brings you a list of at least 12 women who have broken through barriers and overcome obstacles to achieve success in Southeast Asia’s tech industry.

Nabilah Alsagoff, Doku

Alsagoff is the founder and current chief operating officer of Doku, an online payments firm in Indonesia.

She got the idea for her startup after working on a tourism website that was meant to help Bali recover from terrorist attacks in 2002. A Malaysian company was servicing payments for transactions on the website so Alsagoff formed a similar concept for Indonesia.

Doku counts big brands like AirAsia and Sinar Mas Land as its clients.

Veronika Linardi, Qerja

Linardi is behind Indonesian site Qerja, which lets jobseekers and employees share information about companies publicly – much like US platform Glassdoor. Users go to the site to find transparent information about a company’s pay scale and hiring practices.

In March, Qerja raised an eight-digit funding round from SB ISAT Fund, a joint venture of SoftBank and Indosat. It called the round “one of the highest series A valuations of any Southeast Asian startup.”

Linardi, which has led her own recruitment firm Linardi Associates since 2006, is ready to take Qerja to the next level.

Hooi Ling Tan, a former McKinsey consultant, co-founded GrabTaxi with her classmate at Harvard, Anthony Tan. Together, they worked on a business plan for the mobile app that would connect customers directly to taxi drivers via phone. They submitted the plan to a Harvard startup competition in 2011. By 2012, they launched the app in Malaysia. GrabTaxi is now available in 21 cities across the region, and has so far raised US$340 million in funding.

Sylvia Yin, Shoppr

With ecommerce companies rising in waves, the competition is heating up rapidly. On the receiving end are consumers who need to contend with a mess of store apps on their smartphones. Yin experienced this herself, so she co-founded Shoppr, a Tinder-like online store aggregator app.

Yin aims to steer Shoppr from Malaysia to become a leader in mobile fashion discovery and shopping in Southeast Asia.

Reese Fernandez-Ruiz, Rags2Riches

Since 2007, Fernandez-Ruiz and her team have been helping women in poor communities in the Philippines make a living from weaving eco-ethical fashion and home accessories for their startup Rags2Riches.

Rags2Riches sells accessories created out of upcycled scrap cloth, organic materials, and indigenous fabrics online and in retail stores. The startup has trained 900 people in the business – mostly women who reside in one of the Philippines’ biggest dump sites. Before Rags2Riches entered the picture, the women were engaged in handicraft production and had fallen prey to middlemen, who unfairly controlled their access to the market.

This year, Fernandez-Ruiz was recognized by Forbes in its prestigious annual list of 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs. Forbes said she belongs to “an elite group of people who are directing their talent and conviction to better the world.”

Chow Paredes, Zipmatch

Paredes is a professional real estate broker who’s behind ZipMatch, one of the Philippines’ leading real estate portals that lists and reviews properties for sale and rent. ZipMatch is now a driving force in the country’s economy.

Through ZipMatch, Paredes aims to professionalize property brokerage by taking out old industry habits of cutting corners and pushing for sales without a strong sense of customer service. Her team is doing this by taking bulk of the work of brokers, training them, and helping them go the extra mile in servicing clients.

Huang Shao Ning, JobsCentral

The community of internet-based entrepreneurs in Singapore rejoiced when US-based CareerBuilder bought JobsCentral back in 2011, when there weren’t many such deals.

Co-founded by Huang Shao Ning, JobsCentral was one of the largest job portals in Singapore with over 800,000 registered jobseekers at the time of its acquisition. The team’s story serves as an inspiration to many founders who wish to carry out a successful exit.

The Singapore company started in 2008 and came out of beta two years later. The founders, among them Qing-Ru Lim, struggled in the early stages, paying themselves a measly S$410 a month for two years. The hard work bore fruit and they grew their user base to 40,000 businesses at the time of the Zendesk deal. A source familiar to the transaction said Qing Ru got S$3.57 million for her stake in the company.

Alexis Horowitz-Burdick, Luxola

When online cosmetics store Luxola started in 2011, there were months when founder Alexis Horowitz-Burdick could not pay herself or her team, as there was no predictability in the business at that point of time. Fortunately, her colleagues believed in the company, and were willing to sacrifice and forgo their salaries for the bigger mission.

Fast forward to 2014, Luxola raised millions of dollars in funding to fuel its expansion in Southeast Asia. Luxola now has operations in Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, and they ship to Hong Kong, UAE, Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines, and Australia.

Sarah Huang, WhatsNew

Huang co-founded Ardent Capital-backed WhatsNew, Thailand’s rising ecommerce conglomerate. Having spent the last 10 years in ecommerce, Huang is very knowledgeable about this space.

With her at the helm, WhatsNew grew from a small business to a regional one, scaled from one vertical to a portfolio, which now includes brands Petloft, Venbi, Sanoga, and Lafema. She helped increase revenue growth from a few thousands of dollars for the first few months after the company’s launch to US$2 million annually.

However, Huang has moved on from WhatsNew to focus on being a mom and become principal consultant of Buzzebees, which specializes in building mobile technology with an emphasis on consumer loyalty.

As for WhatsNew, it recently announced the acquisition of lifestyle-focused MOXY, its fifth ecommerce store. It continues to aim to build the female economy and be number one in categories it is in.

Esther Nguyen, Pops worldwide

Nguyen grew up in the States. After graduating in 1998, she ran an ecommerce startup selling beauty and cosmetics in US. She didn’t have much experience in running a business so it didn’t last long. Then she went into green technology. It was the dot-com era, and green tech wasn’t sexy; this folded too. Her unsuccessful ventures didn’t stop her though. She set up a developer studio in Hanoi and managed it offshore from the US. In the course of running this business, she saw a big opportunity in music downloading in Vietnam and she went straight at it. She sold her shares in the developer studio to her partners, packed two suitcases, and left the US to put up Pops Worldwide.

Pops Worldwide specializes in producing mobile apps as well as licensing and publishing media. Since September 2008, it has been accumulating the licenses and distribution rights for most of Vietnam’s music – up to 90 percent. It is now the main licensee of Vietnamese music on Youtube.

Thuy Thanh Truong, Tappy

Truong is famous in Vietnam’s startup scene, thanks to all that she has achieved at the young age of 29. She co-founded Greengar, one of Vietnam’s successful mobile startups dealing with games and utilities as well as Tappy, a social app that transforms any location into a virtual community sharing content. In May, Tappy was acquired by game-building platform Weeby, catapulting Truong into becoming Weeby’s director of business development for Asia.

How fast is your internet? How much does it frustrate you? Although you likely have a few options for your broadband and mobile data plans, the answers to those questions are largely dictated by which country you’re in.

Data for the latest broadband and cellular speeds across Asia-Pacific reveal that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan come out ahead in the home broadband race, but the picture is very different for those out of the house on their smartphones. It’s actually New Zealand, China, and Taiwan that surge ahead in mobile data speeds. The web speed data comes from Ookla’s Net Index, and then we’ve turned all those facts and stats into the infographic you see below.

While Asia beats the global average on broadband speeds, there’s still a huge difference between the haves and the have-nots. Singapore is blazing ahead on an average speed of 118.8 Mbps on broadband, but the Philippines is limping along at 3.6 Mbps. Even worse is that while Singapore’s fixed-line speeds have nearly doubled in the past year, the speed in the Philippines inched up a meager six percent in the past 12 months.

It’s a similar story of woe when it comes to Asia’s cellular speeds. While mobile data in New Zealand and China zooms along at an average of 27.7 and 27.6 Mbps respectively as 4G has caught on in a big way in both nations in the past year, people in Vietnam are staring at blank white pages on their smartphones as data trickles out at just 1.9 Mbps.

Email is dying, if you believe the critics. In five to 10 years, it could be obsolete, they say. The medium is nearly as old as the internet itself, and the onset of mobile messaging means the use of email is on the decline. Email is time consuming, distracting, and full of stuff we don’t actually want to read.

But on the other hand, email is universal, easy to use, and free. Perhaps email doesn’t need a replacement, but a makeover.

"Every messenger is a closed platform. I’m on WeChat, you are on WhatsApp, so we cannot talk to each other. […] But email is different because email is a decentralized, open platform," says Heatherm Huong, co-founder of MailTime. "It cannot die, because there is nobody who can shut email down."

MailTime, a startup that makes an app by the same name, adapts email to the messaging app medium. It takes all of your email and reformats it into a chat app interface, similar to WhatsApp or WeChat. The app parses out the body of emails so you just see the meat of the messages in a single chat dialogue – no salutations, no signatures, no timestamps.

The app uses your existing email address. You can add images and other attachments just like you would in a chat app, CC other people into the conversation with a couple of clicks, and assign tasks using the @ sign.

On the other side of the conversation, for those using traditional email apps, a message sent from MailTime just looks like a normal email, albeit usually much more succinct. All the reformatting happens locally on the app.

Email 2.0

The first version of MailTime was in English only and was exclusive to Gmail. The MailTime team hails from Hong Kong, but they relocated the headquarters to San Francisco prior to launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in September last year.

The startup launched version 2.0 two weeks ago, with eyes back on Asia and the international market. It now supports 12 languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and nine email providers including QQ and 163, which are popular in China.

The previous version of MailTime took six months to reach 150,000 downloads, but Huang says it only took 10 days to reach the same number after launching v2.0, at a rate of about 20,000 downloads per day. It’s been featured in Apple App Stores in 18 countries, including China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and South Korea (in Chinese, the app is called 简信).

Currently, MailTime is only available for iOS, but Huang says he plans to launch an Android version in about two weeks.

Lessons learned from Talkbox

Two of MailTime’s three co-founders previously worked at Talkbox, a voice-only chat app from Hong Kong that later pivoted to an enterprise model after WeChat, WhatsApp, and other messaging apps incorporated their own voice message features for free. "You can never beat those kinds of big companies by just grabbing users," says co-founder Charlie Sheng. "When it comes to MailTime, it’s a different story. Everyone has an email address."

"The main reason we created MailTime is because when we were building Talkbox, we had an issue with building [relationships between users]," he explains. "What we are trying to do with MailTime is we are trying to create an open, universal app messenger built on top of this decentralized mail technology. We are trying to make messaging more universal and open."

If MailTime is successful, it could be email’s saving grace. It can’t completely replace your traditional inbox yet, but it cuts out the fat that weighs down the old protocol and gives it a fresh face that works for the bulk of daily correspondence.

Huong says he travels back to Hong Kong frequently, where MailTime maintains an office. The startup will seek funding from China-based investors in the coming months.

Your car is probably one of your biggest investments. But exactly how much do you know about it? When something goes wrong, who do you call?

Auto360 is a one-stop online directory for the automotive industry in Malaysia. The website, which also has an app version, allows car users to find their desired products and services, retailers and service centers, as well as real-time road assists.

So whether you’re looking for spare parts or car services such as washing or tinting, or are in need of the nearest tow truck, Auto360 is the site to go to.

Building a network of partners

The site was launched in February by founder Chan Say Hwa, who is also the managing director of Auto360’s parent company, Hiap Huat Holdings. Hiap Huat a licensed waste management firm that specializes in oil and chemical recycling. It mainly produces quality recycled vehicle lubricant oils such as the AF1 hydraulic oil, engine oil, gear oil, and heavy chasis grease.

Barry Chin, marketing manager for Hiap Huat, says Chan deals with a network of auto shops in the recycling business, hence the idea to put up the online directory. “We have a strong business relationship with these shops. This gives Auto360 the advantage of understanding the nature of the auto industry and dealing with our business partners,” he says.

According to Chin, the automotive industry in Malaysia has been growing rapidly year on year, and naturally, the aftermarket is growing as well. Chan saw this as another lucrative business so he quickly forayed into it.

Best features

On Auto360, the consumers themselves offer the biggest help. The site features reviews from consumers with the aim of making car owners smarter about automobile care.

“Users find the necessary info they need. We provide a column to write down reviews of retailers and their offerings that users can read and comment to. This is beneficial for all,” Chin notes.

To avoid confusion, Auto360 lets users filter through tons of information by type of product or service, location and postal code, and retailer’s name.

However, Chin says their real-time road assistance is their greatest feature yet. “We believe one of the pains consumers face is the difficulty of looking for assistance during a car breakdown or accident in the middle of a busy road. To search for road assistance from the nearest provider is also one of the biggest challenges. With the help of the real-time road assist function on our app, users can easily get the nearest tow truck service available with GPS. This makes Auto360 handy and practical.”

For businesses in the automotive aftermarket, the main benefit is cost-efficient digital marketing. “Auto360 also helps them improve their services and better compete in the market,” Chin claims.

Taking into consideration Auto360’s range of offerings, the company has no direct competitor so far, says Chin. But for the single category of car services, Carama is a rival.

Auto360 currently focuses on building its community of car owners and service providers. Monetization will come down the road as the company plans to transform itself into an ecommerce platform.

Online property portal PropertyGuru announced today it has received a whopping S$175 million (US$129.3 million) investment from a “strategic consortium” of three investors. The group consists of Indonesian media company Emtek (which is already PropertyGuru’s partner in Indonesia), venture capital firm Square Peg Capital, and international private investment company TPG. Representatives from all three companies are expected to join PropertyGuru’s board when the deal is completed in mid-June.

(Update, 10/6: This post has been updated with comments by PropertyGuru CEO and co-founder, Steve Melhuish.)

“These investors spent a number of months doing due diligence […] and they have decided this is a good investment. That kind of endorses what we’ve been doing over the last seven and a half years or so,” Steve Melhuish tells Tech in Asia. The opportunity for PropertyGuru, he adds, is that the company operates in markets that are large and growing all the time. The middle class is emerging throughout the region, and real estate remains the most important investment most people will ever do. Melhuish feels the landscape in more mature real estate markets, like Western Europe, is indicative of the opportunity the Southeast Asian markets present.

The investment will fuel PropertyGuru’s expansion in the Southeast Asia region, as well as marketing and “innovation”, according to a statement. “The process of trying to understand the property market, to research it, to find a property, to make a decision on it, and get the best mortgage, is still very scary because of the amount of money involved, but also because of the market’s lack of transparency,” Melhuish says. “And what we’re trying to do is improve that whole process, make it as painless as possible for the person to make a really sensible property decision.”

After a series of improvements to the service in the last year or so, such as redesigned property floor plans, updated and personalized listings, and new algorithms to help score the properties more accurately, Melhuish says the company is constantly thinking about what else it can do to make the consumer’s life easier. It will also invest in branding to make sure it shows up more in online searches and it will also look into possible consolidation opportunities in the markets where it’s active.

Competing with the old guard

PropertyGuru has been the market leader in the online property space in Singapore, with a strong presence in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand (where it’s known as Rumah.com and DDProperty.com respectively). iProperty, as well as Eduardo Saverin-backed 99.co are currently its main competitors in the region, although both Melhuish and 99.co’s Darius Cheung have said their main competition is print media that still rakes in most of the property listings advertising revenue.

“What we see in all the markets, including mature online markets like France, Germany, UK, Australia, China, is that consumption moves online and then the advertising dollars follow, and rapidly catch up,” Melhuish says. “In Southeast Asia so far, consumption is rapidly shifting online, from 30 to 50 percent in some cases. In Singapore we see that about 15 percent of total advertising dollars are online. But we expect that number to get to 50 percent in the next five years. Likewise, in the other markets.”

According to PropertyGuru, its portals attract 11 million monthly consumer visits and 104 million page views. It claims it has had a 28 percent traffic growth per annum, with mobile making up 52 percent of its total traffic across Southeast Asia. Melhuish said during Tech in Asia Singapore 2015 last month that the company will be looking to IPO in about 12 to 18 months.

As Melhuish tells Tech in Asia, that’s still a possibility, although PropertyGuru is keeping its options open. “We’ve got some great investors on board at the moment, and we’re going to work really hard to accelerate the growth of the business with their help in the next few years,” he explains. “Some of that’s determined by the market conditions, some of that’s determined by whether [an IPO] is the right thing for us. But we still have options and we will continue to review them in the next few years.”

Last year, I wrote that Uber’s spectacular rise was the biggest startup story of 2014. I then said that, like clockwork, we’ll see a glut of “Uber for X” startups come up in Asia. It looks like I’m not far off the mark.

Singapore-based startup Page Advisor, however, stands out in may ways. Open the app and you’ll be bombarded with an assortment of colored tiles. Each tile represents a different service that you can book through the app. As of now, I spot 33 types, ranging from aircon services to car grooming to wine delivery.

Page Advisor wants to be the go-to app for a whole host of services, connecting consumers to small- and medium-sized merchants through the smartphone. Users select and customize the service they want and wait for the bids to come in. They then pick their preferred option and pay within the app through PayPal.

It’s an unconventional approach. One Thielism goes that startups should try to monopolize a niche market and expand outwards; Page Advisor appears to be tackling many different markets at once. Even mighty Uber started out focusing on very specific segment: premium, classy rides for people who “wanted to be baller in San Francisco.”

What works in Silicon Valley may not work in Asia though, and Peter Thiel was speaking from the lens of the Valley. Founder and CEO Fabian Lim tells me focusing on a tight niche works well in the United States, a largely homogenous market. Not so in Singapore and Southeast Asia.

Lim’s goal is to create an app that users will find super sticky, an app that will sit comfortably in their home screens and stay there. An on-demand laundry app, for example, just isn’t going to cut it.

His guiding principle is to increase the startup’s customer lifetime value as much as possible. This is essential as Asia’s fragmented market drives up marketing costs. By offering users a buffet of services, he hopes they’ll spend more on the app, adding to the startup’s bottom line since it earns from transaction fees. Since the customer acquisition cost for a pure aircon servicing app and a multi-services app are the same, why not shoot for the latter?

And given Southeast Asia’s venture capital environment is not quite as frothy as the United States’, this approach could extend its runway.

A colorful personality

It sounds good in theory, but execution is tricky. Startups focus for one reason: limited resources. Can Page Advisor get enough merchants behind it to satisfy users with a decent selection?

Lim is confident. He’s not exactly conventional either, with a colorful history that matches his app. He has an army of 200 marketers in Singapore and Malaysia who are willing to sell Page Advisor’s services without a base salary. This group has been busy onboarding merchants to Page Advisor, with the promise they’ll gain a cut of future transactions on the service.

How does he get them? You see, he has been running internet marketing and “wealth education” courses. These 200 marketers are his students, and he taught them search engine optimization and internet market skills. They in turn offer their services to small and medium enterprises.

In past interviews, Lim said he’s a millionaire. He owns a private plane, bought from money he earned as an internet marketing and web analytics consultant. Some of his clients included Nanyang Technological University, Estee Lauder, and Fujitsu.

He had his fair share of spectacular failures too: he sold silicon bras online, but lost a price war to bigger competitors and stored tons of unsold inventory at home which he later gave away.

Fabian Lim with his private plane.

Just a couple of millionaires

Lim has an entrepreneurial founding team. CTO Boon Peng Ho started a couple of digital marketing agencies. He later founded Indonesian online jewelry store Orori and online healthcare site Tab a Doctor.

Jian Yong Tan, the CMO, apparently became a millionaire by opening a swim school with 300 swimming instructors who trained over 20,000 students. He also runs a golf academy and yoga school.

Also on the founding team is CFO Jamie Lee, who’s part of the husband-and-wife team at Lunch Actually, a dating agency focusing on Southeast Asia. Page Advisor also has finance lawyer Daniel Tan on board as the COO and legal whiz, and it brought on Inderjit Singh, an experienced entrepreneur and politician as an advisor.

The various ventures these guys are running could cause distractions, but Lim counters that he has found people to take over his previous ventures, giving him time to focus on Page Advisor. Further, having a team of people with traditional and stable businesses means they don’t have to worry about paying themselves.

In fact, they have a S$1 million (US$740,000) war chest that’ll allow them to bootstrap. The money gives them leeway to develop a really solid business before going to venture capital firms, which they plan to do in a few months’ time.

Why it could win

The idea has been development for two years as a side project. Initially conceived as a lead generation site for merchants, Lim found that wouldn’t work here.

In the US insurance agents would buy leads from a website or from a lead broker. That’s very common; that’s how they build their businesses. Over here the local businesses are not sophisticated enough to appreciate paid lead generation. It has to do with the fact that they’re all simply busy, they don’t have the systems, they don’t understand how to follow-up. So their mindset’s like, “Why should I pay for leads, I’ll pay for sales.” That’s why we pivoted from lead gen to m-commerce.

This complicated things for Lim; it meant he’d have to reconceive Page Advisor as a complete ecommerce product with a marketplace, an auctioning system, and a merchant interface. He also switched from a web and mobile service to mobile-only, believing the “days of web-based interfaces are numbered.”

In the arena of service marketplaces, Page Advisor has competition. Malaysia has two: Kaodim and Servis Hero. But both are what Lim calls “half-loops.”

In other words, they only bring leads to businesses, whereas Page Advisor allows you to complete the transaction – giving users more convenience. Lim believes this could help secure loyal customers and defend the company’s position.

Early days

The startup held an official launch last month, meaning it’s only just at the beginning of its consumer push. It has been focusing on building the merchant side of the platform, and its 200-strong sales force has signed contracts with 3,000 merchants in Singapore and Malaysia.

In a couple of weeks, Page Advisor received 1,149 job requests, 3,187 bids from merchants, and 167 actual appointments. Increasing the ratio of appointments to job requests is key for Lim. So is dramatically increasing the number of consumers accepting bids – perhaps the biggest unknown in his business model.

The service has kinks to iron out. I found the experience of ordering from the app too complicated. The app worked well enough, but I received calls from a customer service rep notifying me that I’ve received bids and asking me to key in a verification code into the app after I’d gotten my goods.

For an app that targets users familiar with Uber, the intrusive approach is unnecessary and unwelcome. It’s too early to pass judgement on the service though, and over time it should be able to create a smoother user experience.

Nonetheless, the startup already has regional plans. It’s making a push into Malaysia by next month, and plans to step into Indonesia before the end of the year.

In both these countries, expect Lim’s army of internet marketers, armed with their database of prospects, to storm the beaches.

Our saving grace is that this would not have been possible without my 200-strong account management team. If I was alone and I had an idea, I would go single vertical quite honestly […] Trying to motivate 200 people to follow you for two years without salary requires a big vision. I have to sell a big picture. And my big picture is to say, work with us, I believe if we model it correctly we have a chance to become a unicorn startup. And when we get there, I will set aside an options pool for everybody who gets us there.

This list is about them. In no order of merit, we present 10 promising startup founders who are under 30. These entrepreneurs are picked because of their track record and because they’re doing interesting things across Southeast Asia. While the thirties and beyond are often when entrepreneurs hit their stride, you’ll be surprised by what these up-and-comers have achieved.

Siu Rui Quek, 27, co-founder of Carousell

Siu Rui Quek, co-founder of Carousell (center)

When you ride on the subway in Singapore, notice how often Carousell pops up on smartphones. That’s thanks to the efforts of Quek and his equally youthful co-founders Marcus Tan and Lucas Ngoo. The Singapore-based startup’s premise is simple: giving consumers a really easy way to buy and sell on smartphones.

The marketplace has gotten serious traction since debuting in 2012: eight million items listed, two million goods sold. That’s eight transactions every minute. It attracted serious funding too, about US$6.8 million from Sequoia Capital, 500 Startups, Rakuten Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, 99.co’s Darius Cheung, and others. It has spawned several clones like Duriana and Singapore Press Holdings’ Trezo.

For building a popular consumer app in Singapore – which is tough to do – Quek and gang are the new golden boys of the Singaporean startup scene. As Carousell expands abroad, it has a chance to cement Singapore’s status as a startup hub on the world stage.

Achmad Zaky, 29, CEO of Bukalapak

Need more evidence about ecommerce’s ascendance in Southeast Asia? Look no further than Achmad Zaky’s Bukalapak. It’s essentially the Indonesian cousin of Carousell: both are consumer-to-consumer marketplaces spanning web and mobile. Its backers include Gree Ventures, 500 Startups, and Emtek Group, Indonesia’s second largest media company.

Bukalapak presided over US$80 million in transactions in 2014. While focusing on consumer-to-consumer sales early on, it has lately started wooing more small and medium-sized enterprises to sell to its users.

The startup is not Zaky’s first business. He started a noodle shop in his university days but failed. He then launched a software development firm which transformed into a consulting service for the tech industry. Bukalapak began as a side project, but its growth blossomed once Zaky saw the potential in ecommerce. Expect this rocket to continue its ascent.

Jason Lamuda, 29, CEO of Berrybenka

Lamuda is an experienced hand at ecommerce. In 2010, he jumped into the daily deals craze by launching Disdus in Indonesia, which was acquired by Groupon. At the end of 2012, he ventured into fashion ecommerce by starting Berrybenka, which also operates a sister site selling Muslim women’s fashion.

While Lamuda keeps Berrybenka’s numbers close to his chest, SimilarWeb estimates the site saw 590,000 visits in April 2015. The startup has raised over US$5 million in funding from Gree Ventures, Transcosmos, and East Ventures (East Ventures is a Tech in Asia investor. See our ethics page).

Lamuda is a buddy of Ferry Tenka, the founder of family needs online store Bilna. Both started Disdus together. Post-acquisition, they shared the same office and investor (East Ventures) as they launched their new ventures. Could they one day reunite? It’s possible.

Thuy Thanh Truong, 29, founder of Tappy

Truong best exemplifies the twisty road that entrepreneurs climb. She was the founder of Greengar – anointed one of the most promising mobile startups in Vietnam. 500 Startups was an investor.

But things didn’t work out. Its product, an online whiteboard, failed to get enough traction and it lacked a business model.

Truong moved on: her team created a new product called Tappy, which she describes as a “hyperlocal social app that transforms any location into a virtual online community where users can discover interesting people and relevant content.” The app was this month acquired by game-building platform Weeby.

We don’t know how much of the seven-digit deal was in cash, but it meant Truong became Weeby’s director of business development for Asia. We’ll be watching what she does next.

Lusarun “Trumph” Silpsrikul, 25, CEO of Thailand’s Page365

Back to ecommerce, we have Page365, a dashboard for online merchants on Facebook. The tool allows sellers to track inquiries, orders, and complaints, and manage them all in one interface. The startup began after Silpsrikul saw how social commerce was getting popular.

“Almost everyone knew a friend who operated their own online boutique store. One such friend approached us with her pain point and she became our first customer,” he said.

Don’t discount the size of social commerce; Silpsrikul estimates it’s worth at least US$510 million a year in Thailand. While we don’t know how many active sellers it’s serving, it has attracted US$400,000 in seed funding from Inspire Ventures and Galaxy Ventures.

Farouk Meralli, 29, CEO of mClinica

Front row, second from left: Farouk Meralli, CEO of mClinica.

Meralli was working with major pharmaceutical firms like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson when he realized drug companies have no data on where their products are going in emerging markets. In addition, consumers in these countries find medicine too expensive.

MClinica from the Philippines hopes to address this by using mobile technology to bridge pharma firms with distributors and consumers. Patients who visit pharmacies partnering with the startup can claim discounts if they provide their phone numbers. The pharmacy sends transaction details to mClinica to get reimbursements from drug companies. The end result is more transparency and efficiency in the market, which supposedly benefits everyone.

MClinica says it has a network of 1,400 pharmacies in three countries, and it has the backing of investors like 500 Startups, IMJ Investment Partners, and Kickstart Ventures.

Ai Ching Goh, 28, CEO of Piktochart

Goh left a career as a marketing manager at P&G to start Piktochart, a startup that’s made an infographics creation tool aimed at non-designers.

“The main reason why I left P&G was because the bureaucracy was always making things move slower. Once you spot a trend, it is so difficult to go through with it with the large amount of meetings and red tape that comes with it. On the other hand, a startup has much greater flexibility,” the Malaysian told us in an earlier interview.

While quiet on the fundraising front, the startup claims to have doubled user growth and tripled its revenue in 2014. It had 800,000 registered users in February 2014. SimilarWeb saw consistent growth in Piktochart’s site visits from November last year to March.

Chang Wen Lai, 27, CEO of Ninja Van

For guys who have done mandatory military service in Singapore, “ninja vans” are a welcome sight. These are peddlers of drinks and snacks who make their way to training sites, making life bearable for the poor conscripts.

Ninja Van the startup hopes to do the same for ecommerce merchants. Its specialty is next-day delivery for ecommerce companies, and it claims to be working with over 300 merchants in Singapore, including Lazada, Guardian, and Love Bonito. It recently raised US$2.5 million in series A funding from Monk’s Hill Ventures.

Lai started a number of companies in the past. He was the “ironing boy” at Marcella, a custom men’s clothing retailer. He then started Get Fitted, a tool for people to figure out if shirts sold online fit them. Ninja Van is his fourth venture in as many years, and it could be his most successful one yet.

Cameron Priest, 28, CEO of Tradegecko

Priest runs, in his own words, a startup that’s tackling the unsexy problem of inventory management. It gives small online retailers one web interface to manage their inventory, rather than resorting to Excel spreadsheets, paper purchase orders, faxes, or costly software.

Tradegecko claims to have “tens of thousands” of paying customers, though it didn’t provide an exact number. Venture capital firms are impressed: it recently scored a US$6.5 million series A round from NSI Ventures and Jungle Ventures. Priest has come a long way from being a tadpole in startup accelerator JFDI’s pond.

Ferry Unardi, 27, CEO of Traveloka

Traveloka co-founder and CEO Ferry Unardi

Traveloka is a flight and hotel booking site that has become a household name in Indonesia. In the flight category, comScore ranks it number one in the country.

The site is said to get between 4 million to 7.5 million monthly visits, far more than its rival Tiket, which garnered an estimated 1.95 million. It’s riding on a travel boom in the country, and it stands a chance of converting the remaining 90 percent of these passengers to online ticket sales. Its backers include East Ventures and Global Founders Capital, a fund run by the Samwer brothers of Rocket Internet fame.

Unardi is an archetype of the reluctant entrepreneur. He started out as an engineer but found a need in the travel industry that he could fix by building his own solution. Even then, he did not jump in right away, opting for an MBA at Harvard. His plans changed once again when e-ticketing was booming in Indonesia and he realized this was his chance to seize the bull by its horns. He dropped out.

Traveloka began life as a flight search engine and aggregator, and it could have stayed that way. But the company discovered customers were unhappy about using different services to complete their purchase. That led his team to build a complete product for consumers, moving past their comfort zone. For that dedication, Unardi deserves a spot on this list.

Special thanks to Warren Leow and Hazel Samah of MaGIC, Christian Besler of Kickstart Ventures, Kuo-Yi Lim of Monk’s Hill Ventures, Dewi Yuliani of East Ventures, Joash Wee of Between, and the Tech in Asia team for contributing to this report.

With almost one-third of Malaysia Airlines’ workforce laid off this week, GrabTaxi (as MyTeksi in Malaysia) published an image (see above) on their Facebook page late yesterday night, offering a helping hand affected staff by inviting them to apply to join its “ever expanding family”, adding that it was hiring across the board for sales, customer service, marketing and logistic roles.

The linked Google form is a sparse one, providing fields for name, contact number, email address and the option to select one of four job areas, or specify another. That feels like very little information to go by, to filter out prospective hires.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/talk/grabtaxi-extends-job-offers-laid-mas-employees/feed/19What's with all these new accelerators in Southeast Asia? Do we really need them?https://www.techinasia.com/talk/whats-with-all-these-new-accelerators-in-southeast-asia-do-we-really-need-them/
https://www.techinasia.com/talk/whats-with-all-these-new-accelerators-in-southeast-asia-do-we-really-need-them/#commentsThu, 28 May 2015 09:01:05 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/talk/whats-with-all-these-new-accelerators-in-southeast-asia-do-we-really-need-them/This year alone we’re seeing so many new accelerators launch in SEA, particularly Singapore. It feels like a case of deja vu again, cos back when JFDI launched, there was a similar wave? And guess what, most of these accelerators died out. Now we’re seeing another wave, with folks like muru-d, MaGIC Accelerator Program, Rockstart, and l337 Ventures all doing their thing. I’m really skeptical if these guys are adding value to the ecosystem. I don’t see all the top startups at the moment (Grabtaxi, Tokopedia) coming out of these accelerators, so will startups succeed because of accelerators, or in spite of them?

Malaysian mobile app startup Qtix wants to solve a problem that besets us all: queuing. With Qtix, you no longer have to wait for your turn to be served – whether it’s at a bank, a payment center, or a restaurant.

Co-founder Hanif Marzuki describes Qtix as “a mobile integrated queue management system that enables users to get their queuing tickets virtually and receive an estimated time for their service to start.”

“This means within the waiting gap, the user can do other errands. We don’t make the queue faster, we make it efficient,” he says.

Qtix and a number of other startups are dealing with this pain point. But rather than directly getting consumers to download the app, Qtix is doing something different.

Qtix is trying to win partnerships with commercial establishments, which will then push out the app to their customers.

“We are in customer acquisition mode. We’re in talks with prospective clients regarding the integration of our system to their service centers. They include banks, the postal office, and other government service centers,” shares Marzuki. “We expect to get at least three clients on board this year then we’ll grow from there.”

The way they pitch the idea is simple: a bad queuing system can get customers in an irritated mood and dampen their overall experience at a place of business. Qtix helps calm customers and make waiting less painful.

“If people leave the service center happy, it will have a positive impact on the business.”

A frustration turned opportunity

The idea was born out of frustration more than a year ago when Marzuki and his dad waited for five hours to be serviced at a Malaysian immigration office. “We couldn’t go out because we were afraid we’d miss our turn,” he recalls.

Like in the case of many entrepreneurs, this frustration became an opportunity. Marzuki and his co-founders Tan Ji Sheng and Muhammad Ellyas, all 21 years old, brainstormed on a solution. Still in college, they set up Qtix in early 2014.

It wasn’t an easy task, especially for young people with no entrepreneurial background. Marzuki says their biggest challenge was figuring out how to actually start a company. “Over time, we understood that setting up a company is not just about making sales, it’s also about creating a product that suits the market. Some startups only focus on product, others on sales. For us, it’s a balance.”

Good thing they had angel investor Anne Cheng as mentor. Cheng heads Singapore-based SUN Group, which invested seed funding of an undisclosed sum in Qtix. “Anne didn’t just invest her money, she invested time and energy. We have frequent Skype calls and she’s available on our speed dials.”

Qtix is based in Cyberjaya in Malaysia, where it wants to strengthen its presence before expanding to other markets such as Thailand and Indonesia. Currently, it is focusing on product development and customer acquisition using the funds from Cheng.

Other startups that share this space with Qtix are Philippine-based TimeFree Innovations, which sends SMS alerts to users when their turn is approaching, and TikTok, a queuing startup based in Singapore that specifically deals with restaurants. Outside Asia, the likes of Q App and CheckinLine are gaining good traction.

The Asian Entrepreneurship Awards bring together a who’s who of major universities and corporations seeking to support entrepreneurship. The companies participating in the pitch competition tend to be farther along in their development and tackle issues that resonate internationally.

Eight companies, with business models as diverse as 3D biological tissue printing to building a better app monetization tool, appeared before a highly decorated panel of judges: Michael Alfant, Group Chairman and CEO and Fusions Systems Group, Jesper Koll, most recently the Managing Director and Head of Japanese Equity Research at JP Morgan Securities Japan, Erik Vermeulen, VP and senior counsel corporate at Philips, and Yoko Ishikura, professor emeritus at Hitosubashi University.

Cyfuse Biomedical is a startup pushing the boundaries of modern medicine. Led by Koji Kuchiishi, it is working to 3D print bioengineered organs to patients around the world. Founded in 2010, it has received US$17 million to attack a worldwide market expected to reach nearly US$100 billion by 2025.

Kuchiishi has already created a network of Japanese research universities to further develop the product, and is now seeking American and Asian counterparts. His patented process can produce tissue as quickly as one week after culturing the cells. More complex tissue, like a blood vessel, takes up to one month, but the result is a stronger piece of biological equipment. The blood vessels his company produces can withstand up to four times as much pressure as the average human’s.

Cyfuse Biomedical won the top prize and with it JPY 2 million (US$16,000). They also scored free rent at a the KOIL Park and Clip Nihonbashi co-working spaces for two years courtesy of Mitsui Fudosan.

Founder and CEO Li Han Chan knows that people love taking pictures on their smartphones but hate not being able to zoom in to take high quality pictures. Current solutions are too bulky or too expensive, but Dynaoptics has figured out a way to give high quality 3x zoom to a smartphone.

In August 2014, it completed its proof of concept. Its lenses are made of regular plastics and manufactured using typical high volume production practices. Chan has been building a defensible business too – her company holds patents in optical design, manufacturing, and other aspects of the lens for over six countries.

The Singapore veteran has so far raised US$1.5 million on a pre-money valuation of US$8 million in its series A. With the new cash it is looking to strengthen its revenue streams of licensing, lens fabrications, and lens module assembly.

Founder and CEO Chang Chew Soon. The blue object is his company’s reader.

The Malaysia-based, Square-esque mobile payments solution has appeared in Tech in Asia and continues to raise its profile.

Founder and CEO Chang Chew Soon impressed the crowd with his explanation of the company’s rapid growth – live in 10 countries and partnered with 19 banks. The banking angle he explained is what makes his company more sustainable than competitors like Square, he explained. Instead of cutting banks out of the transaction fees, he partners with them. 90 percent of the startup’s profit comes from profit sharing with banks. Another 10 percent is rooted in direct licensing.

The company continues to ship its scanners apace. Able to interact with debit and credit cards, as well as next generation technology like Apple Pay, the hardware readers have gone from 2,000 units shipped in 2012 to an expected 135,000 this year.

All told, Soon says this adds up to a simple value proposition for potential Japanese clients: provide Japanese financial institutions access to 615 million people over 10 countries.

Soft Space took third place and JPY 500,000 (US$4,000).

Innova

CEO Tanaut Sirachaitas

Tanaut Sirachaitas, CEO of Innova had an uneven showing. The Thai company’s concept is that it can help companies filter dirty water more cheaply and effectively than current methods. Globally, that means they can tap into the US$425 billion water water industry.

They are looking to sell their chemical solution and scale in Thailand first, before reaching out to India and Japan. Government and regulatory support has been slow, which is why the startup is seeking business clients first.

Innova did not place, but it did receive the Japan New Business Conference President’s Prize of JPY 300,000 (US$2,500).

Orthoneer, a Thai company, zeroes in on a very specific problem in the world – “trigger finger” surgeries. Trigger finger is what happens when a finger tendon swells to the point that a person’s finger ends up bent, unable to straighten without considerable effort and pain.

According to CEO Phata Techatewon, it impacts 147 million people worldwide and results in 24 million surgeries. The current surgical method takes a week to recover from and has a risk of creating new scarring along the tendon. If that happens, the trigger finger becomes irreversible.

With Sittichoke Anuntaseree, co-founder and orthopaedic surgeon, Techatewon has developed the A-knife, a new tool to simplify trigger finger surgeries. With their product the surgery can be done in less than a minute. Rather than cutting at the tendon vertically as in previous methods, the knife slides along the tendon horizontally until it reaches the inflamed sheath, which is then cut. This significantly reduces the likelihood that the tendon itself will be damaged in surgery.

Orthoneer intends to start its business in Thailand and Southeast Asia before expanding to India and beyond. Via direct sales and clinic partnerships it will gross more than US$5 million this year with about US$1 million in profit. Within five years the startup expects to hit US$48 million in revenue with US$9 million in profit.

As loyal readers might remember, VMFive’s main product is AdPlay. Working with app publishers, AdPlay makes it possible for consumers to give an app a whirl before committing to the purchase. The trial also creates a new opportunity for ads to be shown, winning the company some support from ad agencies and networks.

Though a Taiwan-based firm, it has already started collaborating with D2C, a joint venture with Japanese conglomerates Docomo and Dentsu. AdPlay also has a new partnership with Adways’ popular pre-order platform.

Director of marketing Jessie Wu is confident that Japan will be a welcoming market, citing a Google consumer survey that found 88 percent of app users would like to have a free trial. In the same study 84 percent said they want to try advanced level gameplay, too.

Samsung veteran turned startup founder HoYoung Ban is trying to change the way people recover from strokes. He says that the costs due to stroke in the United States each year hit US$62.7 billion and a typical patient faces nearly US$95,000 in inpatient and outpatient therapy.

To help the process, his team has created Rapael, a “smart glove” that resembles an exoskeleton for a person’s hand. The glove links up with computer software so the person can go through various strength and tactile exercises. For instance, a patient puts the exoskeleton glove on and their hand appears on a computer screen next to an orange. As they close their hand into a fist, the animated fist on the stage squeezes an orange into juice.

The data collected from these exercises is analyzed by a rehabilitation learning algorithm in order improve that individual’s recovery. At US$1,000, the device is considerably cheaper than competitors like Amadeo which can retail for US$100,000.

Rapael has already gotten a clean bill of health from both Korean and American FDAs. It has taken in US$5.5 million in outside funding so far and will be looking to raise another round in mid-2016. Ban projects US$1 billion in revenue by 2019 if he captures just seven percent of the combined US, German, and Korean markets.

Cascube

CEO Chishing Chan

Chishing Chan’s Cascube was another company that didn’t quite strike the right note with the judges. It seeks to reduce drug and biomedical research costs by making animal testing cheaper and more efficient. Namely, the former GSK employee determined that the devices used to monitor animals only record one animal at a time.

Using a more advanced camera array and implanted chips, Cascube closely tracks all animal movements more closely than typical video recorders.

The judges, from l-r:Yoko Ishikura, professor emeritus at Hitosubashi University, Erik Vermeulen, VP and senior counsel corporate at Philips, Jesper Koll, most recently the Managing Director and Head of Japanese Equity Research at JP Morgan Securities Japan, and Michael Alfant, Group Chairman and CEO and Fusions Systems Group

After global financial services firm UBS came out with a striking projection for ecommerce in Southeast Asia – a fivefold growth to US$35 billion by 2020 from about US$1.1 billion today – startups operating in this space are making sure they won’t miss out.

Malaysia-based iPrice, a site that aggregates a multitude of ecommerce sites in Southeast Asia into a single shopping destination, is upping its game. The startup has raised US$550,000 in seed funding from Asia Venture Group (AVG) to double down on its machine learning algorithms and compete with the likes of Pricepanda and Save22.

Established in October 2014, co-founder Heinrich Wendel says the website aims to create an enjoyable shopping experience by giving consumers not only a visual but intuitive way of discovering products. Whereas other sites in the space are all about comparing prices, he explains that iPrice focuses on narrowing down – through an easy-to-use search and filter interface – the vast volume of products online to suit a user’s preference.

“No matter whether you are looking for a blue and black dress, three-inch high heels, a solid backpack, or a classic Chesterfield sofa, we will show you where you can get the best offer,” he adds.

Shoppers browse through millions of products on the site by categories, brands, models, and colors, among other attributes. All products are automatically linked to special promotions and coupons offered by ecommerce stores.

iPrice is already live in Singapore (iprice.sg), Malaysia (iprice.my), Philippines (iprice.ph), Hong Kong (iprice.hk), Thailand (ipricethailand.com), Indonesia (iprice.co.id), and Vietnam (iprice.vn). It offers more than three million products from over 10,000 local and international brands sourced from different ecommerce stores.

Free online marketing

iPrice has already signed up more than 30 ecommerce stores such as Lazada, Zalora, and Luxola. It sources the products on its site using a combination of data feeds stores provide, its own crawler, and an automated classification system. This model appeals to the stores, especially the smaller ones since they no longer need to build up expertise in online marketing to compete against incumbents.

“We know that online marketing services can support retailers in expanding their reach to new target markets and growing their customer base. Therefore, iPrice works with ecommerce sites in the region, offering them an additional channel to market and advertise their products,” notes Wendel.

iPrice assures its partners of a real revenue opportunity, claiming it only sends highly targeted traffic or online shoppers who have a clear intent to buy.

Since its launch, Wendel says traffic on iPrice has been doubling every month. “We have seen tremendous traction – quarter of a million monthly sessions,” Wendel says. While not all of these sessions are successful leads, the conversion rates are high, according to him.

iPrice gets a commission of between five and 15 percent of every sale. Over the last three months, it has booked a revenue of US$1 million.

International expertise

iPrice largely attributes its initial success to the technology it built and to the help it received from investor AVG. “Through them, we quickly acquired international know-how, expertise, and talent in the fields ranging from technology and online marketing to the business side of things.”

AVG is a hands-on, private internet holding firm that focuses on digital distribution models. Its portfolio includes successful investments like iMoney, Trusted Company, and Happy Fresh.

iPrice plans to use the capital it obtained from the VC for two key things. First, it will improve its site by adding more filters so users can really find what they’re looking for and building out its algorithms. “We’ll try to personalize the experience, wherein based on the behavior of the user on the site, we will make personal recommendations. We want to make sure conversion rates for stores are high.”

Second, Wendel says they’re ramping up their sales team to get more ecommerce stores on board.

A universal checkout system is also in the cards, but he says this may take as long as four years.

Curated content

The ecommerce sector has been partly held back by consumers wary of buying stuff online for fear of getting scammed. iPrice addresses this concern by making sure only trusted stores are featured on its site. “We will follow a similar approach and aggregate information about ecommerce platforms. Are they trusted companies? Are they quick in addressing consumer concerns?” Wendel relates.

iPrice goes a step further by incorporating valuable content to help consumers in their purchasing decisions. “We’ll provide editorial content such as tips on how you can find out if a product is fake or real.”

Wendel recognizes that every market is a different culture and perspective in terms of what the community wants. Therefore, it employs local talent in all countries it operates in to learn more about those markets.

“We are targeting all 600 million people across Southeast Asia. Every day a new online store opens, there are hundreds in each country, the potential is huge,” he says.

Missed out on some face time with IBM at Tech in Asia Singapore 2015? Fret not, for here’s your chance to meet them again: the tech giant will be heading to Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta next month.

For these two meetups, IBM is keen to connect with startups and help them understand the role of big tech companies in Malaysia’s and Indonesia’s startup ecosystem. Participating startups will be able to glean insights from the session, which features a panel discussion with several distinguished speakers within the startup environment; followed by a IBM Bluemix demo which allows you to find out how you can build and scale your business with SoftLayer’s global cloud infrastructure. Each meetup will end with dinner and networking.

I’m in! Now what?

Click here to submit your application. Qualified startups will be informed via an email invitation. Remember to check your inboxes! We can only take in a fixed number of startups, so this is on a first-come-first-served basis.

Here’s the detailed agenda:Update on June 4: Lais de Oliveira, MaGIC Community Ambassador & Startup Grind Global Community Director, will be replacing Warren Leow, Executive Director (Entrepreneurship Development) of MaGIC, for the meetup in KL.

Giveaways at the Meetup!

1. Bluemix 30-day trial

Bluemix is an open-standard, cloud-based platform to build, manage, and run apps of all types and offers a single solution environment with the instant resources (e.g. sample code) and infrastructure (e.g. services and runtimes) you need to develop and deploy apps. Attend and get your 30-days free trial.

2. SoftLayer free trial and migration

With data centers and network points of presence worldwide – all connected by a high-speed private network – your cloud is available when and where you want it. See for yourself at the meetup, and get your virtual server for free for one month.

Attendees will also be able to get their workload migrated to the SoftLayer Cloud using Racemi Cloud Path for no charge.

Through the new program, qualifying startups will receive up to US$120,000 worth of credits channeled towards its IBM Cloud usage, giving them the instant infrastructure needed to quickly launch their businesses and focus resources on coding, building, scaling, and bringing innovations to market.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/startups-chance-meet-tech-giant-ibm-investors-kl-jakarta-month/feed/2New tool from Pakistan lets overseas workers pay their bills with bitcoin in just 5 minuteshttps://www.techinasia.com/tool-pakistan-lets-overseas-workers-pay-bills-bitcoin-minutes/
https://www.techinasia.com/tool-pakistan-lets-overseas-workers-pay-bills-bitcoin-minutes/#commentsWed, 20 May 2015 06:18:26 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=248712
Pakistan received US$17.6 billion in remittances in the last year, according to the country’s central bank. The majority of this money was remitted by the Pakistani diaspora – 7 to 8 million strong – consisting of students, blue collar workers, and industry professionals.

The most common reason for sending that money is simply to pay the bills, says Danyal Manzar, co-founder of Urdubit, Pakistan’s first bitcoin exchange. While overseas workers are away, they are still often expected to pay for utilities, phone bills, and internet for their homes and families. But because they receive paychecks in a currency other than their native rupees, they have to entrust a middle man – usually a friend or family member – to receive a wire transfer and pay the bills for them.

This process has many drawbacks. "It’s very difficult for people to pay the bills," says Manzar. "Usually they have to go to the merchant sitting at the local shop to pay their bills." Wire transfers also have limits, high fees, and require a high level of trust in the person receiving the money to spend it as it was intended. Western Union is the dominant player in Pakistan.

"The place that I live in, [the occupants of] three houses across my street are all living abroad," he says. "They have to keep paying bills while they’re gone." Manzar’s neighbors have no means of checking whether the people they remit money to are actually paying the bills, he explains.

Manzar and his team have developed an alternative solution: Paybill.io. Launched this week, the service uses Bitcoin to bypass the geographic limitations of fiat currencies and pay bills quickly, easily, and anonymously online.

An overseas worker, for example, can buy bitcoin from Urdubit or any other bitcoin exchange, then enter a few simple details into Paybill. Select the specific utility company or telco, the customer’s account number, and the amount to be paid. Click on "Pay Now," scan the QR code with a bitcoin wallet app, and the job is done. Paybill requires no registration or personal information other than a phone number to confirm the payment has gone through. The payment process takes less than five minutes.

Once the payment has been submitted on the customer’s side, the bitcoin is converted to rupees through Urdubit’s exchange and sent to a merchant partner. Manzar says Paybill has already signed up 10 merchants in Pakistan who forward the payment to the customer’s selected telco or utility company. Paybill charges a modest one percent commission on each transaction. Half of that commission goes to the merchant, and the other half is used to compensate for volatility in the price of bitcoin while the payment is processed. Paybill effectively operates at-cost for the time being.

It takes less than five minutes for the overseas customer to pay a bill, then a maximum of three hours for his or her payment to be approved. Merchants never have to deal with bitcoin, as they only see rupees come through on their side.

A global solution

While Urdubit is firmly rooted in Pakistan, Manzar says Paybill will expand quickly to other countries. It also operates in Malaysia, where it has another 10 merchants signed up. The payments there go through local exchange BitX to ensure customers are getting a fair deal with local bitcoin rates. The Philippines and Dubai – both large remittance markets – are next in the pipeline. Manzar says he’ll also be signing up more merchants from the USA, Canada, China, Southeast Asia, the European Union, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Bitcoin is often hailed as an ideal solution for underbanked, cash-based economies with low credit card penetration. But like most countries, Bitcoin awareness in Pakistan is still low. Urdubit only transacts about two bitcoins per day (1 BTC = US$232 as of press time). To put that into perspective, Bitcoin payments processor Bitpay one year ago said it was processing US$1 million worth of bitcoin daily. It’s not much, but that’s still a significant uptick from a meager one bitcoin per month when Urdubit launched in October last year.

Barring any unexpected obstacles like government policy changes, the trend should continue on an exponential upswing. Bill payments are just the beginning, according to Manzar. Pakistan is home to one of the biggest freelancing populations in the world – people who often do work for overseas clients. Paypal is not accepted in Pakistan, so freelancers are usually paid by check and wire transfer, which are costly and slow. Bitcoin is a quick and cheap alternative. Remittances paid to individuals is another sector ripe for bitcoin disruption, and it’s already happening in many countries like the Philippines and Indonesia.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/tool-pakistan-lets-overseas-workers-pay-bills-bitcoin-minutes/feed/1Here’s a map of the hottest co-working spaces in Southeast Asia, by countryhttps://www.techinasia.com/hottest-coworking-spaces-southeast-asia/
https://www.techinasia.com/hottest-coworking-spaces-southeast-asia/#commentsTue, 19 May 2015 02:00:07 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=248286

Recent years have seen cash-strapped, cost-conscious entrepreneurs flooding into Southeast Asia. And for good reason – not only is it far cheaper to live here (well, apart from Singapore), the tech community in these parts has also been growing by leaps and bounds. The latter has occurred thanks in large part to co-working spaces which have sprouted up in droves, giving entrepreneurs a place to call home.

If you’re looking to settle down and find your place in this region, your best bet would be to book a spot in one of these co-working spaces and mingle with the community there. Here’s a map of the hottest co-working spaces in Southeast Asia which will jumpstart your efforts considerably.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/hottest-coworking-spaces-southeast-asia/feed/13StockUnlimited wants to be Spotify for stock imageshttps://www.techinasia.com/stockunlimited-is-spotify-for-stock-images/
https://www.techinasia.com/stockunlimited-is-spotify-for-stock-images/#commentsMon, 18 May 2015 05:21:19 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=248091
The “Spotify of this”, “Netflix for that” model is growing more popular all the time where creative content is concerned. It’s no wonder, really; unlimited and easy access to a boatload of content for a low, flat fee? Sign me up! Even as chinks are beginning to show on Spotify’s armor, the model keeps popping up for other kinds of services, like Singapore’s Bookmate. StockUnlimited has decided to apply it to stock images.

Stock imagery has long been the purview of providers like Shutterstock and Getty Images. There are a few free solutions out there, but most either require endless trawling through sub-par images or questionable licensing practices. And there’s Google’s image search function, which… well, let’s just say things don’t always end well there.

StockUnlimited CEO Christian Toksvig knows these waters well. Previously head of business development at Getty Images, he felt the company wasn’t making things easy for its customers. “Content was difficult to find, expensive, and came with a lot of restrictions,” he tells Tech in Asia. “I have always been obsessed with making things simple for consumers. After leaving [Getty], I started looking for partners who were trying to solve the same problem.”

One of those partners was Andy Sitt, founder of Asian stock photography company 123RF, whom Tokvsig already knew. Working with Sitt, who is now chairman at StockUnlimited, Toksvig learned that by basing the company in Malaysia, he would have better access to a vast number of creators on whom a large part of the stock imagery business relies. All artists working with StockUnlimited are currently based in Asia. And Malaysia’s food and weather didn’t hurt either!

Battling piracy with convenience

Users can sign up to StockUnlimited’s service for a monthly subscription of $9.99, which gives them unlimited access to a library of vector graphics, illustrations, and clipart. There is also a 14-day free trial available for anyone who wants to test drive the service. All the images are created specifically for the site by professional artists. Working with its own content creators allows StockUnlimited to manage quality control on the images it provides and also resolve licensing issues with the content.

Toksvig believes that above all, convenience is the way to reach consumers who still consider pirating content as the simplest solution to acquire it. “People don’t use pirated content just because they don’t want to pay. Convenience is a major driver too. We try to deliver such value and convenience that people won’t bother pirating,” he says. At the moment, most of StockUnlimited’s customers are from Western markets, but the company hopes to gain more traction in Asian territories as well.

The startup is still relatively young, having been founded in 2014, but Toksvig says its library is currently home to more than 500,000 images. While that number doesn’t sound impressive compared to other services, the company has reached a point where more than 50,000 new pieces of art are added every month.

While StockUnlimited faces quite a bit of competition in Asia and worldwide, it hopes that the combination of convenience and affordability will be the key to gain a foothold in the market. Its vector- and illustration-rich content also sets it apart from other, photography-focused services. Additionally, it’s exploring other avenues to grow its userbase, such as the possibility of providing bespoke content on request, and potential partnerships with other platforms.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/stockunlimited-is-spotify-for-stock-images/feed/0Malaysia’s My Aone Learning wants to be the Airbnb for all types of lessonshttps://www.techinasia.com/my-aone-learning-platform-lessons/
https://www.techinasia.com/my-aone-learning-platform-lessons/#commentsWed, 13 May 2015 06:39:20 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=247611

In this new age, the more skills you have and the more roles you play, the better off you are. If you’re the type who wants to learn at your own pace and time, the internet offers endless opportunities. Apply for online courses or go to YouTube, where you’ll find tons of instructional videos for anything you’d like to learn.

There’s also no shortage of solutions in case you prefer face-to-face interaction with a teacher or a coach. My Aone Learning is one of these. The Malaysian website connects people with learning centers and instructors who teach classes ranging from academics to health and wellness, sports, and recreational activities.

My Aone Learning runs like room-sharing service Airbnb in that users can scroll through listings from service providers, Gouk explains. It has a messaging feature, which allows users to communicate directly with one another on the platform. It doesn’t control the pricing, but only serves as a marketplace.

Since it launched its beta version in March, My Aone Learning has registered 590​ users, 3​7​9​ lesson providers, and 2​12​ lessons ​in promotion.​

A single solution

By registering with My Aone Learning, a user can be:

a learner, booking a lesson or posting a teaching job and hiring instructors;

an instructor, creating a profile and applying for a teaching job; and

a learning center, recruiting both learners and instructors.

The site vets its users in varying degrees. First off, all users’ personal information are verified. For instructors who teach lessons that involve safety such as swimming, a certification is mandatory. My Aone Learning’s staff also pays learning centers regular visits. There’s no concern about the qualifications of the centers as most are duly registered businesses in Malaysia.

The site provides value to learners by helping them decide whom to hire through a rating and review system for each lesson and lesson provider.

The value for instructors, on the other hand, is less cost in promoting their classes and skills. “They usually search for different channels to market their diverse skill sets. For instance, Amy is a home tutor and a yogi. She has no way to promote both in one profile. We allow that,” says Gouk. Instructors register on the site for free and will only be charged when a student successfully enrolls. It’s the same story for learning centers. According to Gouk, these centers spend a lot of money for offline and online advertisements just to get a lead. Some of them don’t even have websites to attract students.

“We created a single solution for all these users,” he says, adding that a user can be a learner, instructor, and a learning center all in one account.

My Aone Learning takes a 20 percent commission from each enrollment. It also offers lesson providers the option of subscribing to premium membership, which is a recurring revenue stream. Premium membership gives providers more exposure on the site, increasing their conversion rates.

“While using ​our beta testers, we ​already generated about RM1 million (US$277,600) income for lesson providers, and we are profitable at the same time,” Gouk says.

Regional expansion

There are plenty of home tuition agencies in Malaysia that connect tutors and students for academic subjects, but similar services for other types of lessons remain scarce, Gouk tells Tech in Asia.

My Aone Learning itself started as a home tuition agency in 2014. The site is a product of brilliant minds: Gouk has a PhD in chemistry from the University of Malaya in Malaysia, while his co-founder, Liew Teck Zhee, has a masters degree in pharmaceutical sciences and technology from the National University of Singapore. Another co-founder, Soh Ee Venn, has a formal education in computer science and worked in one of the world’s most recognized creative agencies, Resn.

However, shortly after it began operating, My Aone Learning started to receive a lot of inquiries about non-academic lessons like music, and accommodated those. “We found that some of our registered tutors created separate profiles for their teaching skills in piano and guitar. That’s how we came up with the idea for the site.”

Though My Aone Learning has no direct competitor in Malaysia yet, it has counterparts in other countries in the region. In Singapore, there’s LessonGoWhere; in Indonesia, Ruangguru; and in China, GenshuiXue.

My Aone Learning’s goal is to venture out to other Southeast Asian countries. “That’s why we’re looking for further funding,” Gouk says.

The startup received early this year the Cradle CIP Catalyst ​g​rant​ worth RM100,000 (US$27,760) ​from Cradle Sdn Bhd. It is using the money for product development, particularly for the creation of iOS and Android apps.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/my-aone-learning-platform-lessons/feed/4This jobs site wants you to ditch your 9-to-5 and work on a tropical island for a yearhttps://www.techinasia.com/jobbatical-profile/
https://www.techinasia.com/jobbatical-profile/#commentsWed, 13 May 2015 05:51:09 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=247592
We all dream of adventure. We muse about the day we’ll break free from our day-to-day grinds and journey to a far off land with a blank slate and a whole new environment to explore.

But even if the opportunity surfaces, uncertainties hold us back, and the biggest uncertainty is often employment. Will I be able to find a job? What if I don’t enjoy it? Even if the work is okay, what if the food doesn’t agree with me or I find cultural barriers just too big to overcome? It seems all too likely that an adventure could turn into a disaster, leaving you unemployed, broke, and stranded in a strange place with no friends.

To soften the landing for prospective adventurers, a young startup from Estonia wants to help balance the risks and rewards. Jobbatical is a jobs site specifically targeted at skilled professionals who want to try their hand at working in another country. The site currently focuses on IT-related work, with temporary jobs ranging from three to 12 months long.

Now six months into its beta period, Jobbatical offers applicants a choice of about 400 jobs in dozens of countries. Founder Karoli Hindriks says the demand has outstripped supply, with thousands of job seekers in Jobbatical’s community. Typical employers are startups and social enterprises. The startup has 600 employer accounts, but not all of them have posted jobs.

Asia has become a major destination for Jobbatical’s early users. Singapore has more openings than any other country, followed by Hong Kong. Malaysia is another popular choice, and the startup also has jobs in South Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, India, and Indonesia.

"When you are sitting somewhere in Northern Europe or Canada, then working in a startup on a tropical island is like a dream!" Hindriks says.

Dating before marriage

A job ad posted on Jobbatical.

While Asia seems happy to hire talent from overseas, professionals from the region are less inclined to try Jobbatical themselves. The top two countries for talent are the US and Brazil, third is the European Union – particularly northern Europe. Most Asian cultures are quite risk averse in comparison, and the idea of taking a temp job abroad is still a new prospect.

But that perception is slowly evolving, Hindriks says. She likens Jobbatical to "dating before marriage," allowing employees to try out a new country and job before they make a bigger commitment. "For a job seeker, it is hard to make a decision to relocate to a new place forever at once. An agreed timeframe smooths that," she says.

Whether that job seeker is looking to woo a potential long-term partner or just fool around is up to them. Hindriks says she sees both, but Jobbatical doesn’t have the data yet to confidently speak about what new hires do after their initial term is up.

"For us the main thing is to keep building the community with both a certain skill set and mindset – globetrotting tech talent. Asia being the source of both exciting markets that European companies want to reach, but do not have the necessary know-how in their teams, and therefore talent, who could help them."

When it comes to IT talent, however, many companies simply prefer to outsource. Sites like Elance-Odesk and Freelancer make it easy to hire foreign talent on a budget. But Hindriks says Jobbatical fulfills a different role. "In many ways we are defining ourselves as the ‘Elance-Odesk’ with the on-board experience. Simple tasks can be done remotely, but if a person joins in to help build your product, then you want that person to be in your team, understanding where you are heading," she says. "And if a European startup is building a product or a service that is also targeting an Asian market, then the hassle of bringing in the talent is much smaller than building it wrong in the first place."

Beyond just posting the jobs, Jobbatical offers a shortlisting service where it conducts the employee vetting process for the employer. "We are also developing visa and relocation services," Hindriks says. "That’s all on the roadmap."

Applying to jobs from overseas cold – that is, without any prior network or references – is usually a disheartening affair. It takes a lot of sifting through shady wanted ads for English teaching gigs and pay-to-work scams to find a very small number of legitimate gems. And even when such a gem turns up, you likely won’t be the first to have noticed its shine. Without a network in place, the best option is often to move in first and find work later, but that’s a risky gamble. The market is ripe for disruption, and Jobbatical might just be the startup to kickstart a new generation of globetrotting adventurers.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/jobbatical-profile/feed/0Retail services startup Ebizu rings up $139K in fundinghttps://www.techinasia.com/ebizu-seed-funding-cradle-fund/
https://www.techinasia.com/ebizu-seed-funding-cradle-fund/#commentsTue, 12 May 2015 11:15:36 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=247432
Malaysian-based retail support platform Ebizu announced today it has received commercialization funding of MYR 500,000 (US$139,000). The funding comes from CIP 500, a commercialization fund aimed to support Malaysian startup companies and provided by Malaysian Ministry of Finance agency Cradle Fund. The agency offers pre-seed funding of up to MYR 150,000 (US$42,000) to teams to “develop their innovative technology ideas into prototypes or proof-of-concepts.” Seed funding of up to MYR 500,000 (US$139,000) is also offered to startups so as to enter the market.

Ebizu makes tools like point-of-sale (POS) apps, loyalty programs, and analytics for businesses. It combines cloud and mobile to provide a one-stop shop for retailers who want to take their business online and connect with their customers. “We’d like to applaud Cradle for strengthening the commercialization pipeline for Malaysian technopreneurs,” Rohit Maheswaran, co-founder and director of Ebizu, tells Tech in Asia. “It is heartening to see Malaysian startups making waves regionally and we’re glad to be part of this group that believes good ideas have strong potential to succeed in the regional ecosystem.”

Expanding to Indonesia and beyond

The company will be looking to use this funding to expand its beacon network across the regional retail landscape. Ebizu is going to purchase 10,000 beacons – little gadgets that will be used for its proximity marketing platform. The Bluetooth Low Energy devices work together with the platform’s infrastructure to push notifications to nearby smartphones when browsing a participating store, to alert customers that they might want to take a closer look.

After that, comes regional expansion for Ebizu. “We will be using part of this fund to deliver on the ongoing conversations with customers in Malaysia as well in ASEAN capital cities, particularly Jakarta, Bangkok, and Manila,” Maheswaran says. “We will also look to fill immediate and near-future employment opportunities in several fields such as sales and marketing, technology development, operations, and customer service among others.”

Beacons using Ebizu’s service are already in place or are currently being installed in five malls in Malaysia’s Klang Valley, one mall in East Malaysia, and six malls in Indonesia. “We already have several hundred merchants delivering location-based push notification promotions via our platform and we are seeing positive growth in the number of engagements. As we move on to sign up more apps on to our Beacon network, we foresee incremental growth in usage numbers,” Maheswaran says.

Shaking up shopping

The Malaysian startup will be facing some competition in the proximity marketing space in Southeast Asia, however, as rival services such as Indonesia’s Cubeacon and Singapore-based Beacon-In utilize similar technology, but based on Apple’s iBeacon devices (Ebizu has opted for a “flexible, platform agnostic” solution). “The competitive landscape includes app developers who build a single app,” Maheswaran points out. “Our end to end retail solution is a part of a large ecosystem in the making – an essential differentiator.”

Ebizu sees potential in getting app developers onto its network, providing ideas and solutions while Ebizu provides the infrastructure, the know-how and its network of retail outlets. “The completeness of our retail portfolio is yet another differentiator,” Maheswaran says.

At the moment, Ebizu is working exclusively with malls, as they are highly receptive to technology and the number of retail app users is very high, according to Maheswaran. However, the company wants to expand to other spaces, like airports, hospitals, hotels, and office buildings. “We have received positive feedback on the conversion rate we have seen so far in both Malaysia and Indonesia,” Maheswaran states.

Update on 18/5: The post has been amended to reflect the nature of the funding round concerned.

On the Kickstart stage at Tech in Asia Singapore, MaGIC’s (Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre) director of accelerator program and investor relations Warren Leow reveals that it is working on another ASEAN-wide initiative in the form of the ASEAN Center of Entrepreneurship. This will be officially launched in November this year, and aims to be the one-stop platform for Southeast Asian startups to find services and make connections across the region.

As the Chair of ASEAN this year, Malaysia’s aim is to unite the region under the motto “Our People, Our Community, Our Vision.” MaGIC is the agency spearheading this movement for the tech community in particular. Its first salvo came in the form of a recently launched region-wide accelerator program, which will be accepting 50 startups – 30 Malaysian, 20 from the rest of Southeast Asia – in its first batch.

Here are some of the services the upcoming Center of Entrepreneurship will provide:

Linkages to government agencies across ASEAN will be provided via MaGIC Central

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/magic-asean-center-of-entrepreneurship/feed/0KFit gets funding, including from 500 Startups, to be a Netflix for gyms and fitness clubshttps://www.techinasia.com/kfit-fitness-clubs-gym-subscriptions/
https://www.techinasia.com/kfit-fitness-clubs-gym-subscriptions/#commentsWed, 06 May 2015 06:24:16 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=242301

KFit launches today as a monthly subscription that opens up dozens of health clubs in cities across Asia to its users. The service is aimed at people, says founder Joel Neoh, who don’t have gym memberships, Indeed, the new startup is hoping to pull in people who wouldn’t really consider signing up to a gym because they’d be terrified of being forced into slogging on the machines for a year in order to get value for money.

So KFit is about a choice of professional exercise venues in your city. “It’s best if you want to try three of four things every month,” says Neoh. He likens it to Spotify or Netflix.

From doing his homework, Neoh reckons that about 90 percent of people in Malaysia’s urban areas don’t have memberships to any fitness centers. And that’s repeated throughout much of Asia. He’s launching KFit to the public today after running in quiet beta for a month.

KFit is now available in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Hong Kong with a selection of health club options in each. Melbourne, Sydney, and Auckland will be added by the end of the month. The startup team is already up to 40 employees as they rush to rope in gyms, yoga classes, pools, and a variety of other exercise options. The plan is to add a new city each week. The choices in each city will vary, and the prices will be set separately depending on how pricey that locality tends to be.

KFit revealed today that it has raised a seven-figure US-dollar seed funding round from 500 Startups, SXE Ventures, and Founders Global. Two angel investors also joined in – Daniel Shin, founder and CEO of Ticket Monster, and Danny Yeung, the former CEO of Groupon Hong Kong. Yeung is a former Groupon Asia teammate of Neoh.

Serial entrepreneur strikes again

This is the first new startup since 2010 for serial entrepreneur Neoh (pictured below). His previous venture was started up in that year and was acquired – by Groupon, no less – before the year was out. That resulted in him becoming Groupon’s VP for APAC, a position he left only a few of weeks ago.

In the short sliver of time since leaving the daily deals giant he has been building up KFit ready for today’s launch.

Though KFit sounds very different from the world of daily deals, Groupon, and Groupsmore (Neoh’s Malaysian startup from 2010 that Groupon snapped up so quickly), Neoh says the two concepts are not a world away from one another. “It’s about local commerce,” he points out – but this time it’s health clubs rather than retailers.

“Consumers are super connected, but businesses are not,” Neoh says, and that’s why he sees a big opportunity in – years after daily deals persuaded local stores to get on the web and engage with nearby shoppers – connecting gyms and other fitness destinations with people in the same city. Like with restaurants, gyms often have a lot of empty slots to be filled at off-peak times, and a broader array of users that would come from flexible subscriptions would fill many of those gaps.

As he sees it, it’s still about “bridging consumers with service providers.” Because of that, he says that “Kfit ties in with lots of things that I’m passionate about.” Neoh reckons this is about his tenth startup venture.

The number of venture capital deals in Singapore has stagnated, according to Jason Lin, the head of business development at Tech in Asia‘s own Techlist, who spoke on stage today at our annual Singapore conference. While Singapore is often thought to be the leading country when it comes to tech startups in Southeast Asia – its 39 deals last quarter still outnumber the rest of the region by a wide margin – other countries are closing the gap fast.

Indonesia and Malaysia both roughly doubled the number of VC deals in the first quarter of this year to 24 and 13, respectively, according to Techlist data.

Ecommerce and marketplace startups dominate the list of Southeast Asia’s biggest funding rounds. Indonesia’s upcoming ecommerce giant MatahariMall was by far the largest at US$500 million, along with Elevenia taking the number three spot. Rocket Internet’s car marketplace Carmudi sits in second place. Singaporean startups make up six of the top 10.

Lin notes that there are no repeat lead investors among any in that list, proving the diversity of Southeast Asia’s venture capital scene. “Ecommerce still has a large window of opportunity for investors who are interested in this sector, growing from 11 to 22 deals last quarter,” Lin says.

Indonesia and Malaysia are leading that growth in ecommerce.

The average funding round in Southeast Asia is worth US$1.6 million, with the average valuation at US$6 million. Techlist data shows the region’s notorious series A crunch is coming to an end. The number of series A rounds more than doubled quarter on quarter, outnumbered only by the number of seed rounds.

Investments in startups in the region are heating up, and we’ve seen VCs pour money into a variety of companies at different stages. Naturally, we’ve also seen some deals hit a snag.

Tech in Asia has learned from sources that recently, 500 Startups didn’t push through with the signing of term sheets with three startups – one based in Singapore, the two others in Malaysia and the Philippines. For two of the companies, 500 Startups cited conflict of interest as reason since the fund had competitors in its portfolio.

We’ve reached out to the startups. While all were disappointed with the decision, one said there was no harm done since it was talking to a few other investors at the time. This wasn’t the case for the other one, however. Based on the startup’s account, two other investors wanted to join 500 Startups in the round, but couldn’t keep up with the pace of negotiations. So the investors decided to drop out, while the startup told them it’d be going with 500 Startups.

The startup further told us they thought it was a done deal, judging by how talks with 500 Startups managing partner Khailee Ng went. But the fund called the whole thing off later on, saying there was some overlap with another startup currently in its portfolio.

It was like a rug had been pulled out from under the startup’s feet. The founder told Tech in Asia it caused some delay in their plans and forced them to continue bootstrapping. The third startup didn’t want to comment.

We reached out to Ng for his side of the story. He stressed that there was never a solid commitment to invest, only verbal expression of interest. “There’s a big difference between interest in participating in a round versus actually participating in a round (signing on documents). I’ve never backed out of anything that I’ve signed. However, after giving verbal interest, a variety of things can cause things not to translate into a signed commitment.”

Fair enough, competing investments are a valid reason to withdraw interest. There’s also no legal issue here because a term sheet isn’t legally binding. Even the startups know this.

Still, wouldn’t it have been better had 500 Startups known from the start, even before the terms sheets were prepared, that there was a conflict?

Ng said: “We tend to know ahead of time. [But] we invest in seed stage where companies do pivot, and in many cases overlap is not direct. Hence, sometimes it becomes only clearer later on.”

We reached out to other VCs for their insights on the matter and we got mixed opinions.

Dmitry Levit, general partner at Digital Media Partners, told us: “We prefer to offer a term sheet only after having gone through extensive preliminary discussions with the company, and the negotiations leading up to a signed term sheet may take months given that we like to be as specific as possible in the term sheet for the sake of clarity. Therefore, for us, matters such as potential conflicts of interest should have been resolved before the drafting of the term sheet.”

However, Levit acknowledged that every VC’s process is different. There’s no universal standard as to when a term sheet is supposed to be offered.

Jenny Lee, managing partner at GGV Capital, explained that investors not pushing through with the signing of term sheets is common. There are even times that a pullout happens after a term sheet has been signed. “A term sheet is not a legally binding document but an expression of interest and terms are subject to due diligence.”

Ng shared the same view: “Even after the signatures on the term sheet there’s a chance of not getting to execution documents.”

Given that any deal may not follow through, Levit said what’s important is how reasons are communicated. “We would generally look much more dimly at a party that withdraws from the negotiation at any time without explaining their change of direction, as compared to a party that withdraws even at a very late stage of discussion while offering a suitable explanation.”

Valuable lessons

There’s a number of reasons why a deal doesn’t push through – financial and legal issues during due diligence, fraud, internal problems from the VC or startup side, and so on. The culprit may come from either side of the negotiating table.

So what’s the key takeaway for startups in this whole thing? The deal isn’t done till the money is in the bank.

“The term sheet, at whatever stage of the process it’s offered, is just a statement of interest and an attempt to propose a framework for what the eventual transaction would look like. Treating it as a rock-solid representation or guarantee of investment is dangerous and naive under most circumstances,” noted Levit.

Lee added: “Try to have a few backup options to financing. Do not start raising funds too late in the process; start while you still have at least six months of cash runway so if the unexpected happens, you still have time to react.”

Ng, for his part, said: “A fundraising process can drag out or can be lightning fast. But like any startup skill, it’s one they need to be good at. Always have options and backup options!”

Update on July 30: The earlier version of this story stated that 500 Startups issues term sheets and then retracted them. Tech in Asia updated the piece based on new evidence that 500 did not issue any term sheets, and only provided verbal interest, although one startup tells Tech in Asia that it went ahead to draft a term sheet based on what was verbally agreed upon in the discussion.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/500-startups-term-sheets/feed/1Bookya has an easier way for music artists and promoters to work togetherhttps://www.techinasia.com/bookya-music-artists-promoters-booking-platform/
https://www.techinasia.com/bookya-music-artists-promoters-booking-platform/#commentsThu, 30 Apr 2015 09:16:47 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=245948
Ah, the life of a rock star. Playing your music on stage, basking in the adoration of the crowds, traveling the world… and spending half your week trying to book a venue for your next show? That’s definitely not rock’n’roll, and yet it’s something a lot of musicians have to put up with. It brings in the cash, after all; touring and live performances have been the major revenue source for musicians for a while now.

Bookya is a startup based in Malaysia that hopes to streamline the venue booking process for live music shows so that musicians can focus on playing songs and wrecking hotel rooms – well, the less affluent stars will have to skip that second thing. Through a website and a mobile app, the company hopes to provide a type of social network where music artists and promoters can meet and connect.

The problem Bookya seeks to address is the fractured and disorganized nature of live music bookings. Handshake deals, last-minute backouts or no-shows, disputes over fees; these are all problems that inexperienced and small-time artists have invariably faced at some point in their careers.

“We want to create a standardized yet flexible booking process,” Bookya founder and CEO Samuel Klyk tells Tech in Asia. Bookya aims to provide a platform where this process can be completed in fewer steps and with added accountability for artists and promoters. To use the service, the artist or promoter is verified by Bookya via the use of email, social network accounts, and personal websites. The network’s social character, a kind of LinkedIn for the music touring industry, is also meant to help smaller artists with issues of discoverability and connections.

World party

The company has its eye on the global music stage, not aiming for one market in particular. Their hope is to create a massive database of live acts, promoters, agents, and eventually venue owners, all of which will be able to connect via the service to do business. According to Klyk, the service already contains one million artist profiles in its database, waiting for the respective artists to claim them. The database is also currently home to over 100,000 individual events. The team draws from publicly available data such as Foursquare listings, Facebook events and profiles, Soundcloud profiles, and so on, in order to provide up-to-date information regarding events, venues, and artists.

Launching a global networking tool for the music industry from Malaysia might be tough, but the Bookya team is confident its combined expertise will help them pull through. “Tech and music comes together here,” Klyk says. Besides him, notable figures in the team include CTO Ruben Tan, who has MyTeksi (as GrabTaxi is known in Malaysia) in his resume, chief growth officer Eelke Arjaans, and co-founder and advisor Ingo Vogelmann, a DJ and music producer with 20 years of experience in the music industry.

“I think the industry network we have through our founding partner Ingo and the technical expertise of the rest of the founding team makes it a really strong combination,” points out Arjaans, who is in charge of reaching out to artists and agencies and getting them to try out Bookya’s platform.

Until recently, the service had 200 beta testers, a combination of artists, promoters, and agents, obtained through Vogelmann’s network of industry contacts. After launching its public beta, that number is expected to rise as the team travels the world to tout the service, stopping at events such as the International Music Summit in Ibiza, Spain and Midem in Cannes, France – perhaps the music industry’s top trade event.

It’s good Bookya is willing to do the legwork. The music industry is a difficult mistress to please and has demonstrated on numerous occasions that it’s set in its ways. The team acknowledges this might be a problem for them going forward. “We are disrupting an industry and there are some people who don’t like this idea,” Klyk says. But it’s those very people Bookya needs to get on board in order to succeed. “We definitely don’t want to scare off the agencies and the agents. They still need that flexibility and they still need to be able to manage their artists. We don’t want to replace anyone in this industry, we just want to optimize it.”

Forging connections

For now, Bookya will be optimizing its platform, which will be evolving in the next few months to include functions for promoters and venue owners, the show booking process, and a website or social media button that can serve as an instant connection to the corresponding Bookya service. The team also envisions partnerships with online music ecosystem stalwarts. Bookya is supposed to be flexible enough to connect to eticket services, Spotify artist profiles, or Soundcloud profiles (to which the platform is already connected) as needed, to provide a well-rounded service.

Between artists, venues, promoters, and agents, Bookya will be handling quite a lot of information. “Bookya is all about big data,” Klyk says. As things progress, the team will also be looking for data analysts to help make sense of what they have gathered and the best use for it. But they say the technology is already in place to handle the data that comes their way. “Scaling up is absolutely not a problem,” Klyk says. “We have been working on the backend for six months now.” Arjaans adds, “Bookya will rely on how we handle that data.”

Bookya’s base will be shared between Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur. Remaining in Malaysia is very important to the company, both in terms of the support team it can build there on the technical side, but also in contributing to the country’s startup and tech ecosystem. “We want to bring more people back,” Arjaans says. “We see a lot of brain drain here in Malaysia, which is a big problem for us.”

The Bookya team is involved both in initiatives to help other startups get, well, started, and also campaigns to promote computer literacy in Malaysian children. “I started [to work with technology] when I was 16 years old,” Klyk adds. “We want to teach the youth here what is possible with web development, and on the other side bring people back to Malaysia.”

Bookya is not alone in trying to connect music artists in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur’s Gigfairy is a similar service that has recently come onto the scene. Bookya’s edge seems to lie in its international goals from the outset, and also in its data-heavy approach. Bookya has already received US$500,000 in seed funding even before launching, so the way to center stage seems wide open.